There is something very important that hasn't been addressed in all of this fascinating discussion:

Social dynamics are different for every age group. I believe people fall in to four (4) different categories, all relative to when the WWW was first publicly available.

1. Those who were already established adults and working on their careers (our parents) (25-35+)

2. Those who were still developing and learning (probably everyone here) (~5-25)

3. Those who are usually stuck in their ways, less likely to learn (our gradparents) (60+)

4. Those who were born with the internet already extremely developed (kids in high school now, etc)

* note: the ages above are at the time the WWW launched, not ages today.

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Each of these groups were subjected to different paradigms of social connection and privacy and therefore have different concerns or interests about privacy.

Group 1: Our parents are first were interested in using the internet to research, shop, and other non-social activities. Facebook was ours for a long time until eventually everyone's parents started joining, and now they are reaping the benefits and finding old connections with old friends, but they don't face the same issues of privacy, because they didn't develop a social life through Facebook like we (Group 2) have. Although, if your parents were like mine, they had initial reservations about putting their CC info online, or being searchable online, or having websites track their behaviors, while we (Group 2) were less concerned about it.

Group 2: Our group is the most sensitive to privacy, because we're the only group that knew what it was like before and after Facebook. We were also at an extremely social point of our lives when Facebook came out, and we still are now, even more so because of the addition of Facebook to our lives. We are mixing friends with coworkers with family and acquaintances. Our social lives grew side by side with Facebook. For us, Facebook is engrained in our lives and is part of the fabric of our lives. This wasn't the case for our parents.

Group 3: Our grandparents generally had no interest in learning to use the internet (with some exceptions, of course), let alone be on Facebook. This group is out of the realm of social networking online.

Group 4: The youth. They have grown up with social networks present and a part of their lives from the beginning. And just like our parents were apprehensive about things that we (Group 2) didn't care about, this group is less sensitive to the same privacy concerns that we are. The world is more open for them, and they are less likely to care about their privacy settings beyond hiding stuff from their parents. When you are in high school, you only have one group of people you know… kids in your high school. As you get older, you start to have multiple groups of friends from different stages, you high school friends, college friends, soccer team friends, work friends, and that is when privacy became a concern for us (Group 2).

The point is, it's going to be very hard to make one blanket solution that addresses every demographic, as privacy is not as much of a problem for anyone but Group 2, us. So, this is probably what Mark Zuckerberg sees, that the world is inevitably heading towards total openness, and that privacy is dead. I tend to agree that privacy is dead, and that people's lives in the future are going to be far more open than they ever were before. Instead of resisting it and trying to create all of these blanket private social networks (which all fail), we should embrace it.