This isn't obsession - I was shocked yesterday when Facebook prompted me to update my privacy settings, and I found that in several places they chose (by default) to loosen privacy in significant ways.
This is deliberate and sneaky - if someone just clicked through the dialog they'd automatically sign up to broadcast to the world what was before set as private communication.
The link you give doesn't say anything about settings in the new privacy wizard failing to take effect. I set everything to "old settings", and when I went to my privacy page it had indeed kept all the old settings.
I expect people experiencing this just forgot to click one of the radio buttons or something. It would be better if the wizard defaulted to "old settings" for everything, but it really isn't that hard to use.
My apologies, you are correct about that article. For some reason I thought that article provided better information.
I can however state that from my personal experience all of my information was set to "Only Friends" and after selecting "Old Settings" for everything, most of my privileges were reset to "My Networks and Friends" ... I don't have documentation of that, but that was my experience with the tool. I had to manually go back through each to make it map to my desired privacy settings.
Other posters have mentioned how this fails also - but more egregiously, when I went through the wizard several key options were by default not "old settings". Anyone breezing through the tool would have gotten caught.
This is deliberate and sneaky - if someone just clicked through the dialog they'd automatically sign up to broadcast to the world what was before set as private communication.