[span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"]Actually, I believe when facebook first started it was a 'private  network' and nothing got out or was shared. It has been in the reverse  ever since. [/span][br style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"][br style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"][span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"]I remember students at this one university in the  Seattle area getting in trouble by the school administrators when  someone posted photos of them with beer in their dorms. The site was  controlled and a private network.[/span]
Actually, I don't think so.  I watched a program once where this guy demonstrated how quickly he could gather information from almost any profile, those blocked as private included.  It was amazing.  Little tricks, like finding a woman who talks about a brother, which gave him her maiden name.(often used as bank or other passwords)  Clubs, gyms, where she worked etc. (sometimes followed up with a phone call assuming the identity to gather even more info)  The list was endless of the amount of info we put out there that is useful to those who know what to look for.  People with pics of their kids on there freak me out.  As one police officer once described it, "it's like a pedophile's catalogue.
It is not, nor ever has been private.  It's only gotten blatantly worse, that's all.