Since I don't have first-hand knowledge of Facebook, the following may be considered "hearsay observations" pending your own confirmation or refuting.

While I'm a non-participant and have never registered with Facebook, it's impossible to miss reports that Facebook has made obscure, confusing, obstructive, and (some say) dangerous changes to security and privacy policies and settings at least, by my count, four times in the past few (6?) months.

Various media that I believe are trustworthy have published "how to protect your information" guides as each of these major changes have appeared.

Whlle I haven't seen the face book pages involved in settings recommended, it would seem that the necessary (what most people would want) settings required, for any of the recent changes, cannot be described in a page of instructions, much less in a paragraph.

As I haven't saved or bookmarked any of the articles I've seen, I would recommend that anyone with a Facebook account do an intelligent search for articles on "Facebook Security" and/or "Facebook Privacy." Ignore blog posts and/or "user feedbacks," and look for formal articles/reports from recognized publishers. Be very careful that instructions you choose to follow relate to the most recent changes at Facebook, if you can figure out which ones those are.

Most of the reports I've seen come from Ziff Davis Publishing, and may have included articles from PC Magazine, eWeek, ExTreme Tech, and/or others published by them. UK users might find a magazine called PC Advisor more accessible despite occasional (mild) hysteria and hype on some subjects.

Based on recent past performance, you may be assured that Facebook will "redesign" their site and will change their policies so that you will be forced to repeat this exercise approximately quarterly, so bookmarking sites that provide intelligible and useful advice on the subject for future reference is probably a good thing to do.

An example: According to reliable sources, at least one recent change made your account information, which probably includes your name, age, address, phone number and email address, publicly accessible (to those who know how to access them) unless you make changes to settings to declare them private. The required settings are, according to the reports, not visible in menus and unlikely to be found without someone to guide you to them. Further, one source asserts that the settings a "reasonable person" would expect to be most secure do, in fact, permit Facebook to sell access to your account information (to advertisers?) while the setting you need is described to make it appear less secure.

Facebook: the End of Secrets gives a "philosophy of privacy" that might be of interest.

John