Hysteria
But it hasn't ended there. It has been extensively reported that Facebook had an emergency meeting of its senior management yesterday, to discuss the growing popular revolt around this privacy issue. Again, we have a statement from Facebook regarding this.
"We don't share specifics around internal meetings, but we had a productive discussion about the latest product announcements and how we can work on providing the best experiences for users and developers."
This meeting seems to have really agitated the blogging masses, with Robert Scoble publishing a disapproving open letter, the Huffington Post equating Facebook's actions to those of BP over its Gulf of Mexico oil leak, and Business Insider publishing an alleged IM thread from Zuckerberg 6 years ago referring to people who trust him with their personal information as "dumb f*cks".
Here's what Facebook had to say about the latter: "The privacy and security of our users' information is of paramount importance to us. We're not going to debate claims from anonymous sources or dated allegations that attempt to characterise Mark's and Facebook's views towards privacy.
"Everyone within the company understands our success is inextricably linked with people's trust in the company and the service we provide. We are grateful people continue to place their trust in us. We strive to earn that trust by trying to be open and direct about the evolution of the service and sharing information on how the 400 million people on the service can use the available settings to control where their information appears."
This has all culminated in the founder of the TechCrunch blog, Michael Arrington, posting that everyone could do with chilling out a bit on this topic. He doesn't appear to be any great historical ally of Facebook.
While we think it's right that a company with so much control over so many people's personal stuff should be under constant close scrutiny, the latest coverage is getting on the hysterical side. Zuckerberg is clearly very ambitious - as his Open Graph project demonstrates - and may well be making some mistakes in pursuit of that ambition, but you have to hope the market will be the arbiter of whether Facebook is doing the right thing.
But even if most users couldn't care less what Facebook does with their data, there are a lot of other very powerful companies, which have based their business around the Internet, that are ready to capitalise the moment Facebook takes a wrong step. Like Apple, Facebook is learning that once you get to a certain size, a whole new set of rules apply.
You can read Facebook's guide to privacy here.
