kvey

Remember when Mark Zuckerberg declared that the age of privacy was over? Well, that was before he spent $100 million on 750 acres of Kauai North Shore plantation and beachfront, the majority of which will sit undeveloped in order to provide a buffer between his private retreat and the public who might want to pry into his life. That’s in addition to the four houses he bought around his home in Silicon Valley, which sit empty, providing an exclusion zone that protects him against prying eyes. Then there was the time he flipped out because his sister screwed up her (deliberately over-complicated and difficult-to-understand) Facebook privacy settings and shared a photo of a private family moment. When Mark Zuckerberg (or Eric Schmidt) declares privacy to be dead, they’re not making an observation, they’re making a wish. What they mean is, “If your privacy was dead, I would be richer.” The best use for Facebook is to teach people why they should leave Facebook.

The thing about programming is that you won’t see the cause of a bug until you’ve spent at least thirty minutes telling the world that it’s fundamentally impossible for it to occur.