The plethora of online and offline stories about Facebook's handling of its members' personal privacy seem to be centered around the issue of the firm's rather uncertain and fluctuating commitment to protecting its members' interests. Every couple of weeks, it seems, Facebook re-defines the privacy rules that govern its member-shared information, with the result that, as the Financial Times recently noted, not only has the company "gradually eroded the privacy rights of its users, but it has done so in a confusing and opaque way. Facebook's privacy controls are now so complex and hard to understand that many have been nudged into 'sharing' a lot..." Indeed, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is in such a huff about these changes that it was moved to publish a visual time line cataloguing Facebook's transition from its initial 2005 promise to share personal data only with friends, to the current warning that any application accessed via Facebook would be given "General Information" about the user. In a less successful company, many of these irregularities and confusions might go unnoticed, but Facebook now numbers roughly half a billion subscribers, so everything it does gets subjected to scrutiny.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and principle owner, turned 26 just this month, and so perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that someone of his age would place less importance on the privacy issue than many older consumers do. There is, after all, a distinct generation gap delineating people's attitudes toward the importance of protecting personal privacy, with the younger generation generally less concerned about privacy breaches than their elders. (If you doubt what I'm suggesting here, then just ask your 20-something niece or nephew how concerned they are about the personal information they reveal to others through mechanisms like Facebook, YouTube, or Flickr. Watch for stifled yawns and the telltale roll-of-the-eyes "whatever" look.)

Even though they may be less concerned with individual privacy, however, these younger consumers are even more obsessed than their elders are with honesty, transparency, and authenticity when it comes to online corporate interactions. So it isn't quite as easy to explain away the capriciousness with which Zuckerberg's firm has tinkered with its "terms of trade" when it comes to members' privacy rights. Not only does this indicate something about Facebook's lack of commitment to its members' interests, but there has also been a patent lack of authenticity in its many different official explanations for its actions. This is definitely not a "transparent" company by any definition of the word.

If Zuckerberg truly believes that the interests of his company's users should be primary, as can be said of many other highly successful new-age companies (including Amazon, Google, and Apple, of course), then he ought to have a reasonably clear picture of how to structure the privacy protection issue, in a way that properly reflects his generation's attitude as well as the basic principle that customers come first and transparency is vital. This, unfortunately, does not appear to be the case. Rather, it seems this is one Generation Y member who not only has little regard for privacy, but might have just as little regard for the interests of his users, as well.

As intelligent and ambitious as he his, by many accounts Zuckerberg is not a very nice person. That is, he is apparently the kind of person who likes to bully, cheat, or rip people off for the sheer fun of it. Business Insider claims to have uncovered a great deal of incriminating dirt in the story of how Zuckerberg founded his company back in 2003, after blatantly deceiving some Harvard friends who had come to him for help with a similar idea (later settling a lawsuit they filed against him for more than $60 million). These stories might be attributable to his immaturity at the time, or they could reveal a deeper character flaw, but from the standpoint of a Facebook user such a distinction hardly matters.

When stories are told about Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page, they often revolve around their maniacal obsession with the user experience. These entrepreneurs worried about delivering people the search results they wanted as fast as they possibly could, and then getting them off the Google site, so users would have the best, most convenient experience possible. Google's investors worried about the firm's ability to monetize its fantastic success if all they were doing was hustling customers immediately off their site (clearly, this was not going to be a business based on forming a "portal," or a single site where a user's every desire would be met with no need to leave). But Brin and Page were insistent, and the user experience remained their most central, all-consuming concern.

When stories are told about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, somehow they all seem to revolve around his sleaziness and willingness to deceive, including not just the question of whether he ripped off some friends who trusted him, but whether he isn't playing all his users for suckers. Little is ever written about Zuckerberg's concern for Facebook members. Why is that?

Business Insider, clearly no friend of the Zuck, has one additional very scary clue, in the form of some instant messages between Zuckerberg and a friend, in the very early days of "The Facebook," when Zuckerberg was only 19. He had just launched "The Facebook" from his dorm room at Harvard. According to Business Insider, the IM exchange went as follows:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks.