Some good stuff coming from Jason Calacanis’ blog yesterday. The esteemed web man and founder of Mahalo.com took to the internets yesterday, eloquently blasting Facebook for changing their privacy settings to benefit their own cause.

If you use Facebook and have logged in sometime over the past two weeks then you’ll surely know what he’s talking about. The social networking megasite changed their region assignments a few weeks ago, and everybody who’s logged on has had to reassess their privacy settings. Here’s how Calacanis explains it:

In case you missed it, when you logged into Facebook this week you were road blocked with a popup explaining that they “we’re making some changes to give you more control.” Sounds good, and like most users looking to quickly get into a website or application, I simply clicked through the message. How important could it be?

When faced with a TOS (Terms of Service) or license the world has been trained to hit the word “agree,” and click, click, click until they get to the actual website or software they were trying to get to in the first place.

Everyone in the industry knows this, and certainly a company built off of studying social behavior like Facebook would. Since the ToS is considered a formality, it is up to technology companies –- in fact our industry –- to behave. If we don’t behave well then we are going to get regulated by clueless politicians and policy makers. That would suck for everyone.

Yes, Jason, that most definitely would suck for everyone.

So where did Facebook go wrong? It couldn’t have been ignorance, right? Facebook’s hip, young staff knows better than anyone that ToS approvals never get read. Calacanis thinks it’s greed.

The entire purpose of Facebook since inception has been to share your information with a small group of people in your private network. Everyone knows that and everyone expects that. In fact, Facebook’s success is largely based on the fact that people feel safe putting their private information on Facebook.

When you do get to the second page a series of confusing radio buttons default –- yes, defaults –- to giving everyone access to your social graph. Wow. I’ve been using the internet since before images were supported. I’ve been a member of every social network since Six Degrees and Ryze, almost a decade before Facebook became available to the public, and I was confused by their settings page. An average user, certainly, has no idea what is going on by these changes.

So why is Facebook trying to trick their users? Simple: search results. Facebook is trying to dupe hundreds of millions of users they’ve spent years attracting into exposing their data for Facebook’s personal gain: pageviews. Yes, Facebook is tricking us into exposing all our items so that those personal items get indexed in search engines–including Facebook’s–in order to drive more traffic to Facebook.

With 350 million users worldwide, you’d think that Facebook gets enough page views per day, but who knows. Zuckerberg and his Facebook crew have never done much to hide the fact that they’re out for world domination.