Your daily dose of “Farmville,” “MafiaWars,” LOLcat postings or political rantings may recently have been interrupted with Facebook’s announcement of a new feature: Facebook Messages. No, not the messaging service Facebook has provided since 2006, but a new take on messaging that, so says its marketing team, is revolutionary in its simplicity and integration.

Facebook’s new messaging service combines the functions of SMS, e-mail, instant messaging and its former messaging service into one interface. Its communication revolution involves a simplification of the messaging process: dropping subject lines, CC: and BCC: fields and erasing the boundaries between multiple media.

While Facebook can pat itself on the back for offending the traditional means of communication, a prerequisite to labeling something a new-media technology, their innovation is deeply flawed. Communication is a context sensitive process. When we send e-mails, text messages or instant messages, we do so with different levels of urgency, formality and content. Our ability to control our contact with these different media allow us to organize our lives socially, professionally and topically. Blurring these boundaries is unlikely to be a welcome revolution for those of us who live multi-faceted lives and don’t need our grandmothers texting us their e-mail forwards.

Facebook also promises to separate your bank statements from your party invitations. Yes, read that again: Facebook thinks we trust it with bank statements. For a service that has a poor track record of privacy and data ownership, and is friendlier to its third-party developers than its users, the idea of sensitive financial information circulating through its servers gives pause to even enthusiastic social networkers.

Finally, Facebook’s revolution seems shockingly similar to the evolution of Google’s Gmail service. With more than eight years of development, Google has incorporated SMS, video chat, IM and phone service into Gmail, all with a better track record of security, and less frivolous social network fluff — Buzz not withstanding.

The need for a website that started as a way to deepen social connections around campus to constantly reinvent itself and pry into new areas of our social lives is frustrating and, to some of us, violating. Features are rolled out behind a veil of flashy corporate marketing phrases and technocratic jargon, without enough knowledge or agency given to the user to judge its impact.

If tech companies want to seriously prioritize the user’s privacy and promote more informed usage of online services, they can do so with a few easy steps.

First, services like Facebook Messages should be an opt-in service. If you want the service turned on, you should need to actively do it yourself, not have it thrust upon you and search for the option to turn it off, if indeed it exists. Next, adequate information should be given on the privacy and ownership of your information and your ability to remove it in the future. Finally, an independent watchdog group should be set up to verify and report on claims of privacy, and advise users on sharing information with increasingly intrusive and far reaching services.

That said, if you disagree with our analysis, feel free to complain to us on Twitter or Facebook.