[Super74]

Have you heard of the phrase, "When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck."

Well even from the beginning of Facebook, within the Harvard campus, Mark Zuckerberg has been surrounded with allegations ranging from questionable personality traits, unethical behaviors and outright illegal activities.

Now with the release of a new "biography" detailing the early days of Facebook in Silicon Valley, these instances continue to highlight character flaws that seem to some to be quite disturbing. So why are we so surprised to witness continued actions of betrayal and lack of customer-focused decisions on behalf of a company that he runs and guides on a daily basis? "Zuck IS a duck!"

Personally, I totally agree with the concept of a more open society and the need for a platform in which to exchange personal ideas and personal media with friends and family. What I don't agree with are the blatant decisions that manipulate that information in ways contrary to the users' choices.

Many times in the past year, I have been literally offended and personally shocked at the amount of attacks to this information of mine and have contemplated closing my account for those reasons.

Instead, I have controlled my privacy options as best as I can and have held on to see where this all leads, in the hope that Facebook will finally get their act together and re-focus their energy on connecting people, not causing anguish those people who make them the billion dollar company that they are, their customers.

With Zuck the duck in charge, I'm not so sure that this will happen.

[dejb]

> Mark Zuckerberg has been surrounded with allegations ranging from questionable personality traits, unethical behaviors and outright illegal activities.

It certainly seems he wouldn't fair well if he applied the concept of ‘radical transparency’ to himself.

[c1sc0]

Now that would be an interesting distributed effort to see: try to build a timeline of all of Zuck's questionable behaviour on a single site, we could call it something like zucksucks.com ;-)

[Super74]

Absolutely brilliant! Just start with all of the articles citing direct actions on his part. I'm sure the compilation would end any speculation as to the nature of his character, if there ever was any.

[frisco]

What would that accomplish? Please spend the time you could be slandering a persona everyone loves to hate doing something more meaningful with your life.

No one ever claimed that Zuck is Zuck because he's a good guy; Zuck is Zuck because he's CEO of Facebook.

[Super74]

Slander: a malicious, false, and defamatory statement or report.

Since when did calling someone on their verifiable actions become slander? When America becomes complacent to the lack of moral and ethical accountability of our CEOs and business leaders, the end cannot be far away.

We must expect and demand a certain level of trust from the people who safeguard our personal information. The possibilities offered within the concept of "the cloud" will never come to fruition without this essential component.

What if your bank decided to publish the activity on your accounts?

[Silhouette]

> What if your bank decided to publish the activity on your accounts?

As something of an advocate for privacy and data protection, I have found it instructive to compare the recent behaviour at Facebook and Google with that of Mint, whose entire business basically depends on people trusting them with access codes to their bank accounts.

I'm not saying Mint's approach is perfect, but this is the first line in point 1 of their Privacy and Security Policy (http://www.mint.com/privacy/security-policy/):

"Simply put, we do not and will not sell or rent your personal information to anyone, for any reason, at any time."

(For the avoidance of doubt, I am in no way connected with Mint, Intuit or any related organisation. I'm just an interested observer of how privacy and security are handled by on-line businesses, and found them a useful example.)

[joubert]

I wouldn't necessarily single him out, but it would be interesting to create a site where profile pages + wall messages + photo albums get created automatically based on daily news of public figures.