According to this post on the eff.org site (Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information).
In a nutshell:
“Once upon a time, Facebook could be used simply to share your interests and information with a select small community of your own choosing. As Facebook’s privacy policy once promised, “No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.”
How times have changed.
Today, Facebook removed its users’ ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users’ profiles, “including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests” will now be transformed into “connections,” meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don’t want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them.
The example Facebook uses in its announcement is a page for “Cooking.” Previously, you could list “cooking” as an activity you liked on your profile, but your name would not be added to any formal “Cooking” page. (Under the old system, you could become a “fan” of cooking if you wanted). But now, the new Cooking page will publicly display all of the millions of people who list cooking as an activity.”
Smart People I Know 
I use it, hopefully as carefully as possible, but it pisses me off when I see things like this.
Ditto. It’s too bad: it could be a great platform. Instead, I keep hoping something better will come along. If it does….well, let’s just say once Yahoo! had a pretty good lock on the leadership of the search engine business, and MySpace was the hottest social platform at one point….