In the wake of a storm of criticism, Facebook seems to have made it easier for users to opt-out from some of its privacy practices.  I'm not sure exactly which ones a given article is talking about, because there were several ones that people reacted negatively to.  (A good summary can be found here.)

First was their practice of "updating" your friends every time you made a purchase with a partner site.  (This came up when the WSJ Law Blog purchased tickets through Fandango.)  Initially you had to opt-out at each and every partner site.  Looks like they made a global opt-out available.

It turns out that they were collecting this information anyway and using it for advertising purposes.  And this is the subject of an editorial on the San Jose Mercury News:

This is actually a fairly common practice.  Just ask Amazon.....  I would guess the media backlash will die down, and it's tough to tell whether all of this will have any appreciable effect on adoption or advertisers.  Probably not.  (In the end, it's also worth focusing on the privacy policies of the partners, as opposed to the policy of Facebook.  The partner privacy policy is the one which should say it will transmit personal information to Facebook.)

NB:  on a related note, the Facebook founder recently filed a motion to force an magazine to take copies of his diaries (which it had posted) off-line:  "Among the goodies found therein are 'his Social Security number, the full name of his girlfriend, and the address of his parents' house in New York.'"  He lost that motion.  (On second thought it looks like the reporter in question obtained the documents from the First Circuit - although the court had ordered the documents to be sealed, at this point the cat was out of the bag.)