Zuckerberg doesn't misunderstand privacy, he misunderstands people.

<long_story...
It was the summer of 2004 and I was anxiously awaiting my freshman year of college. Facebook had just been opened to schools beyond the Ivy League, and I distinctly remember being jealous of friends who were headed to USC in the fall, as they received .edu email addresses before many of the rest of us, and were consequently able to register "thefacebook" accounts first. I attended a smaller private university in Southern California, and Facebook went live on our campus roughly six weeks into that first semester.

It felt as if everyone—geeks, football players, rich white girls, international transfer students; seriously, everybody—holed up in their dorm rooms for the next week to play with their new vanity toy. And this wasn't the Facebook you all obsess over now: no apps, no statuses, no pictures, no official pages, no high/junior/elementary schoolers, few adults, really a different thing entirely. But it was enthralling.

I've seen every every major change in Facebook's offering since then, and Mark's right; Every time they've added, removed, or otherwise tweaked a feature, people have become "outraged," formed groups often numbering in the hundreds of thousands to express said outrage, then promptly gone back to not giving a shit and commenting on each other's pictures.

As a marketing/decision science wonk, I can relate to the expectation that people don't actually know what they want, and if asked explicitly to describe what they want, they're almost universally wrong. I get it. I also understand moving forward with features like personal photo uploads paired with user-generated metadata despite pushback from users. It was a year before the iPhone and two years before Android, how could they possibly be expected to understand...yet.

Nevertheless, I think this experience may have warped Mark's approach to his product and the feedback of his users. After a dozen instances of the feigned outrage/complacency/acceptance cycle, why wouldn't Mark (or any other Facebook employee) meet any criticism with "Don't worry, guys. You'll get it eventually." The user base keeps growing, most press coverage is glowing, and investment is flowing. What's the problem?

The problem is that as increasing numbers of people and businesses sink increasing amounts of time and money into this thing ("this thing" being Facebook specifically but also Internet identity/socialization/lifestyle in general), each feature, each policy decision has increasingly significant consequences in the real lives of real people. The problem is that "Should 16-year-olds be able to join our nascent social network?" is a fundamentally different problem than "As we continue to insist that we are your de facto identity on the Internet, do we have a responsibility to provide robust and usable tools to give our users some hope of controlling that identity?" Yet the response from Facebook hasn't changed, and it unfortunately amounts to "Cool it everybody, we've got this covered. You'll get it eventually."

On the topic of privacy on the web, Eric Schmidt famously claimed: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Pardon the expression, but fuck you, Eric. You were born in 1955. You do not and cannot understand what the experience of living a life on the Internet entails. If there were pictures of you from every party you attended in high school and college, presented such that your dopiest, most uncouth acquaintance had carte blanche to append whichever moronic comment first came to mind to the permanent record, and the company maintaining the system repeatedly defaulted your privacy settings to "make sure everyone on earth sees this shit," there is no question in my mind you'd be singing a different tune.

Mark thinks his users' immature preoccupation with privacy is fleeting. If that is truly the case, it's one more reason I think Facebook is fleeting. There seems to be this bizarre assumption that Facebook, as the social network which has to date been the most successful in attracting "normal" and old people, will remain the 800 lb. gorilla til kingdom come. Sorry to disappoint, old folks, but you'll all be dead soon and I don't much care where you post your status updates until then. Insofar as my generation is concerned, I've been a geek among normies my entire life. I went to private, Catholic, rich kid schools for nearly two decades, where I played sports, hung out with jocks I sometimes tolerated and rarely trusted, spent my weekends acting hopelessly awkward around the ladies from our all-girls Catholic "sister" schools (yes, this part of my personality fortunately improved in college), and went home at night to listen to Devo and Invisibl Skratch Piklz records, try to teach myself object-oriented programming, and talk to my Internet friends.

I've observed hordes of people who would insist vehemently that they're "not a 'tech person'" adopt and bail on AIM, adopt and bail on MySpace, and now they've all adopted Facebook. Perhaps Mark thinks there's something special about his creation which has drawn the attention of people who would otherwise be completely disinterested. That his product is so compelling/entrenched that it almost doesn't matter which decisions he/his company makes or who bitches about it, they'll come around eventually. I'd argue that there are more dyed-in-the-wool Internet citizens born every day, and with a much more sophisticated, internalized awareness of "how2internet" the only inherently compelling quality of Facebook is that the people they know and care about are already there. Facebook is far from a perfect product, and any competitor with a marginally better feature set, or shinier chrome, or just some dumb luck could signal the six-months-to-ghost-town countdown for Facebook like MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal and (fill in the blank) before it.

Given that assessments of Facebook's privacy controls and policy have grown more frequent and more scathing, one needn't look far to find opportunities to act as the disruptor in the continued evolution of our identities online.

Oh, and Mark, sweetie: if privacy concerns are soooo 2002, why's your profile on lockdown, bro? You got something to hide? Your unwillingness to chow down on your own dog food doesn't exactly instill confidence in the integrity of your position. Perhaps your investors, advisors, or ad-buyers have their own incentives to chip away at the privacy of your users. Or maybe you just need to kill privacy yourself before you'll be willing to take a seat at the table.

(edit: Changed double hyphens to emdashes. Oh, iPad.)