As I blogged earlier, Facebook’s policies and settings are themselves a problem, misleading users and indeed, abusers. It’s now being charged with violating federal privacy laws:

“Ten privacy organizations filed a complaint against Facebook Inc. to the Federal Trade Commission Thursday, arguing that recent changes to the social-networking company’s privacy policies and settings violate federal laws.

The complaint, spearheaded by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, was triggered by changes Facebook made in November and December. Those changes included recommending people set more of their information to be public rather than visible only to friends and treating new information, like a person’s gender and lists of friends, as “publicly available information” that Facebook may share with software developers who build services for Facebook users.

The complaint asks the FTC to investigate the practices and to require Facebook to restore previous privacy settings that allowed people to choose whether to disclose personal information.

A Facebook spokesman saidit “discussed the privacy program with many regulators, including the FTC, prior to launch and expect to continue to work with them in the future.”

The complaint is the latest sign of how privacy—or at least consumers’ perceptions about it—remains a problem for Facebook.”