I don't get all this fuss, to be frank.

As someone has already said, most people don't care, so if the settings defaulted to full privacy, the feature would be close to useless. That's the reason such features default to public on Steam and other platforms.

Also, while I understand the desire to keep things completely private, let's keep in mind that no confidential information is leaked here.

Your activity is not even recorded if you don't use Galaxy and play via standalone EXEs (as I believe many users who care about complete privacy do).

While I'm not sure about what exactly is going to be in user profiles, you'll probably need to fill them yourselves for them to show anything personal.

Any other info, including your list of games is seen by default by friends only and if you use Galaxy, you're already aware of the fact they may see what you're playing.

As you can see, in many cases the problems with default privacy settings are rendered null. And if someone sees your list of games (someone you added to friends, might I add), keep in mind it's not like they've laid their hands on your credit card credentials.

In other words, keep it in scale. This is not the end of the world. Sure, such default settings have their drawbacks, but if they were private, no one would use them. Just look at the setting allowing people to only be messaged by friends. It's set like this by default and no one cares enough to change it. It'd be the same with profiles, which would be a waste of all the hard work put into this feature.