I said nothing about Facebook. Facebook is a manifestation of a social network, and thus cannot be private by definition. All it does is allow people to spread things, and to do it efficiently as possible; it has no other use. Privacy exists going into the Internet, not on the Internet.

But the Internet is not the problem. Instead, the problem is this attitude:

> If someone in my circle of friends shares something with the outside world that they shouldn't have, then they are in the wrong and will have to accept whatever the punishment is

This isn't how the real world works.

Your friends have other trusted friends that aren't you. The separation isn't between "my circle of friends" and "the outside world"; there is no "outside world." Your circle of friends each has their own circles of friends, who have their own, and those circles, together, comprise the entirety of the world. There is no separation; no barrier there. It's a problem of incorrect perspective to put a dividing line around the people connected to you and no one else—because, to everyone else, that's not where the line is. It's around them, and their friends.

You'll ask your friend for advice on something, who will delegate the question to their own friend. You tell someone a secret and ten other people will find out, all in complete confidence. You'll end up doing embarrassing things in other people's wedding pictures, or being captured in a photo alongside them in a bar. This isn't something that can remain private, because these aren't facts about you. They're stories occurring in other people's worlds, in other people's circles—they just happen, tangentially, to have you as a property of them.

Now, usually, all this leaked information doesn't come back to you—people have the sensibility to keep the secret secret. And the world goes on that way just fine. Ten people will know about something embarrassing you did, but, because they are aware of the rules of our culture, they won't tell you they know, and you can go on leading your life pretending nobody knows.

The problem with the privacy after the advent of the Internet is not that these people now know your secrets. The problem with the Internet is that it makes the slip-ups of the third-parties public, permanent, and irrevocable. It vocalizes the maid-and-butler conversations that we all managed to pretend weren't happening, and, in doing so, ruins our collective facade of propriety.

And, unless we throw away everything about how the Internet works, we're just going to have to learn to work around that permanence. If anything, we need to kill the desire for sites like Facebook, not Facebook itself; we need to remove ourselves from our collective lecterns and podiums before we ruminate upon others' secrets. And that's hard–that's changing human nature, or at the very least, the nature of Western society. But that's what we have to do, if we want to keep this gift of a worldwide network of permanently-remembering machines alive.

(And note—what Facebook is doing right now has nothing to do with all of this. Everything that Facebook has done to "decrease" the privacy level of its userbase could have been done by a third-party by collecting the login details of a few not-particularly-privacy-conscious[1] volunteers and then spidering Facebook from their viewpoints, re-building its social graph within their own servers. This could still be done today, and is not an exploit that can be patched in any way, shape or form. As I said: social networks are inherently public.)

[1] Like these: http://www.silicon.com/special-features/protecting-your-id/2...