When it comes to privacy, there are a great number of varying opinions.  Some people are strident and think of it as a “right”, and some think pricay is dead in the Internet age.  It is a debate that will rage on for some time to come.

In terms of the current Facebook privacy uproar, personally, I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg could be more wrong in his approach.  There is indeed a place for privacy on the web, and I’m guessing that most of his users completely believe that Facebook will protect their privacy. You know Facebook will deny they’re up against a wall, but in reality they certainly are. The kid who allegedly texted while at Harvard saying that people who gave him personal information on the internet are “dumb f**ks”, is now in charge of the largest-ever cache of human information in history.  Is he acting with maturity, with foresight and with hindsight?

No, of course he isn’t.

Because he’s too young to understand the implications of his actions.  He’s literally selling the individual proprietary stories of millions of human lives, in the interest of money making.  He’s enacting a social experiment that he doesn’t understand, and he’s destroying any trust that Facebook users have in him.

Let me be clear when I say that I completely believe that this generation of young people have their finger on the pulse of the massive change needed to bring us to a more humane, connected, responsible world.  I give a lot of leeway to young thinkers, precisely because they are not tied up yet in societal rules.

But what Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t see is that he’s created the most successful (yet) global brain.  People from all over the planet connect on his platform.  He’s gone from ‘fringe’ to ‘mainstream’, in less than a decade.  He has a caretaking, leadership responsibility to all his users, and he fails them when he makes them take 20 steps to protect their privacy.  I went on to my account and my daughter’s account and shut the spy hole on us, but I was able to do it because I’m tech savvy.  Regular social users of Facebook are being sold upriver.

At this point in the growth of the social web, it does matter that each individual assumes that they are protected by apps and websites and platforms that they use.

Mark Zuckerberg, and sadly Facebook, have not shown maturity and consideration and due diligence in caring for their community.  This 25 year old clearly doesn’t understand what he’s done and hopefully today someone at Facebook can get him to do what’s right.