Brace yourself, Facebook friends: Here comes everyone.

Facebook is changing. Last week, users logging in to the site were met with a little box that asked them to take a look at their privacy settings. After much discussion and a go-round with the Canadian government, the service has completely reworked its all-important system for determining who sees what.

On a site that 350 million people – 350 million! – use to send love notes and share photos and offhandedly stalk one another, that’s not nothing. The new privacy system should make it simpler and easier for users to guard their information.

But without explicitly announcing it, Facebook has hit a turning point. Even as it has made it easier for users to lock down their accounts, Facebook has also started to nudge its users toward doing the exact opposite. It’s making their accounts public as never before – open, in fact, to the whole wide Internet.

Is this the Facebook we know? It’s a sea change for a company that built itself on the premise of providing a private space for friends. Believe it or not, it may be the best thing that could have happened.

Facebook’s old privacy system was riddled with foggy exceptions and loopholes. For instance, photos that you might have thought were strictly private were often visible to people who weren’t on your Facebook contact list.

Then there was the haywire system of “regional networks” that Facebook made everyone join. Among other things, the system counted Toronto as half a province and insisted that everyone in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., actually lived in Sudbury, which displeased residents of both cities equally. Sharing information with these oddball networks – which is what Facebook did, unless you changed your settings – could lead users to expose themselves much more widely than they realized.

In Facebook’s simplified new scheme, you can opt to share various bits of information with friends, or friends-of-friends. Alternatively – and this is where Facebook buried its surprise – you can select a new option: making parts of your profile available to “Everyone.”

They’re not mincing words here: “Everyone” means what it says. “When you share or publish content to ‘Everyone,’ anyone on the Internet will be able to view it,” reads Facebook’s new online manual. Crucially, this also means that “Everyone” information will be open to the all-seeing eye of Google.

This change isn’t being rammed down anyone’s throat. But Facebook is applying some pressure. I opened a brand-new account as a test, and sure enough, the default settings would have exposed my posts to “Everyone.”

Existing users who have already moved to lock down their accounts will see those locks remain in place. But – and here’s where things get sticky – those who signed up to Facebook and never changed their privacy settings were prompted – by default – this week to open most of their profiles, including critical content like notes and photos, to “Everyone.” According to Facebook, that describes between 70 and 80 per cent of all users.

This particular tactic caused a rumpus online. Privacy watchers accused Facebook of pulling a fast one: promising users greater security, while at the same time encouraging them to open up their profiles to all and sundry. But Facebook has been largely above board about the change. Forcing all of its users to examine their privacy settings, as they did this week, most likely got far more people to contemplate their security settings than ever had before.

Most importantly, the idea of encouraging users to open their profiles is a fundamentally honest one. By inviting “Everyone” in, Facebook is inviting us to acknowledge some simple truths about itself.

In the long run, it’s in Facebook’s best interest to coax its users into the open. As the company has told reporters, more openness means more people finding each other, which means more sharing, which means more traffic, which means more opportunities for making money. I, for one, am glad it is talking about money. Not enough talk about how it’s going to generate cash leads to too much wondering about what on earth it’s really up to.

At its heart, using Facebook has always meant strutting on a public stage, and the supposed privacy it afforded was never as complete as many users liked to think.

All the privacy settings in the world won’t stop your friends from leaking information to each other. Pretending that fiddling with settings will keep your stuff safe, and not just obfuscated, amounts to doing the dance of the seven dialogue boxes with your privacy.

Facebook isn’t a private diary where your secrets will be safe from all but your dearest friends, who will cradle them to their bosoms. It’s a website where you go say things in public, while the company tries to make money off you. That’s fine. The clearer we all are on that point, the better off we’ll be. Facebook has done well to elbow us in that direction.