FB have taken out huge newspaper and billboard ads in Belgium, pretending to care about your privacy. They're trying to divert attention from their real privacy issues, by saying "you can choose who can see your stuff".
If I could be given a bit of latitude to generalize for a second, I've noticed that America has a very "self-focused" culture wherein the individual is often seen as being solely responsible for everything relating to their self.
That makes a lot of sense but I've seen this often taken to extremes such that the perspective is used to absolve various levels of government, corporations, and organizations from responsibility over making decisions about common goods or on the behalf of others (things like healthcare, safety/protection, insurance, privacy, etc.).
So this position from Facebook seems (to me) to be a very American approach to take. ie. "We give you a plethora of options to secure your information, thus it's on you what information we get. After that, once we have it, then its ours and not yours anymore."
That simply reflects technical reality. Once you give them information, you no longer can restrict what they can do with it technically. legally, sure, you can write whatever law you like, but the best way to protect your privacy continues to be technical measures.
The privacy regulators have the authority to enter your business and server locations and look directly at the data you have and what you do with it.
Also, laws do have an impact even if there is no technical mean to enforce it. Working without paying taxes is forbidden but has no technical means of ensuring it. Yet, most pay taxes.
What is so difficult about deleting, not collecting and not using data?
The difference is that under German law merely having access to the data doesn't mean you can use that data. This isn't really a novel concept to anyone that's ever heard of an NDA.
When the privacy settings are hidden away in some non-obvious, hard to find place, you can guess Facebook tried really hard to prevent you to actually change them.
When the privacy settings reset to "allow almost everything" at every update, you can guess Facebook tried really hard to make your changes ineffective.
Privacy settings only exist for plausible deniability. And that plausibility is dwindling every year.
