Facebook gets a lot of grief for their privacy gaffes, and for the clumsy way of rolling out new features that impact privacy, but they are also an important model to understand for any social networking site dealing with their own privacy policies and privacy settings.

This is obvious when you look at this great piece in the NYTimes on The Price of Facebook Privacy. Facebook’s newest Privacy Policy is 5,830 words long, longer than the US Constitution. The accompanying infographic displays the 50 settings with more than 170 options user have to navigate.

With Facebook pushing the limits on distributing information, nearly every type of content in your profile has its own controls. So instead of saying all photo albums are private or public (which could cut off huge amounts of information, and the information sharing that fuels Facebook), users have granular control over individual albums. Some you want to share with family, some you really don’t.

As you sit down to map out the privacy policy and settings for your own social networking site, you will be balancing your desire to have people share (which drives interaction and engagement) with their desire to control who sees what. While yours may not be as intricate as Facebook’s privacy controls, keep in mind that they will have set your users’ expectations about the level of control they have over their information.