Facebook thinks you’re pretty important. In fact, you’re the product they sell — your information, and your eyeballs. It would be over the top to compare it with literally selling people, that is to say, slavery, but it is none the less a touchy business model.

That’s not to say it can’t work. Google is an example of how if you respect people and adopt a policy of ‘do no evil’, you can actually make loads of money derived from user information. I think it boils down to what the facebook quitters say on their web site : “For us it comes down to two things: fair choices and best intentions.” Google meets that standard while Facebook does not.

It should be easy for those who don’t value their privacy to provide all their data on the open web if they want to. But that’s how the default gradient should be — you should have to go out of your way to lose your privacy, not have to go out of your way to protect it. “Fair choices and best intentions” says it very well.

Listening to Zuckerberg in a piece on the BBC World Service today, it sounds like they’re not going to be tweaking their defaults significantly, instead focusing on making the interface easier to use. But even there, this would not be happening without the recent public outcry, so while I think closing one’s Facebook account in advance of the emergence of a reasonable alternative may be a tad premature, I none the less applaud the message sent.

Where we agree is with regard to not providing much personal info to Facebook. They only really require name and birth date, and they don’t even check up on those (I’m quite old, having been born in the early 1930s. Their sign up system wouldn’t accept dates from the 17th century, or I’d be older still.). Ultimately any privacy policy which includes a provision for change without notice is worthless, so no matter what is said therein, it is safest to regard the info as public from the start.