Facebook Founder Zuckerberg Tastes The Sting of His Own Bully Tactics

Betcha never meant for that to be public

So Facebook is not exactly known for protecting people's privacy. Besides many grievous displays of poor security, they have only added decent privacy controls over time none of which matter because you can get to the pictures anyway and every installed Facebook app can get all your data too.

All that aside, assume that setting your privacy controls is still better than not setting them. Facebook pulled a real jerk move recently when it required all users when they first logged in for the day to make a decision about their privacy settings. You had to click to keep your current settings, but if you didn't, it would open your profile up using the new default settings.

Though it doesn't probably change anything in the long run, it's quite satisfying to know that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, fell prey to his own tactic.

In a bit of very interesting timing, Zuckerberg’s photos have been made public to the entire internet, mostly through a post from gossip blog Gawker, after Kashmir Hill at True/Slant discovered and reported that Zuckerberg was sharing photos with a wide circle — friends of friends — and his event calendar with everyone.

Serves him right.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a call seeking comment about whether Zuckerberg’s changes to his privacy settings were deliberate, leadership-by-example-style actions. But in a status update on his profile (pictured above), Zuckerberg says he sets most of his content open and “didn’t see a need to limit visibility of pics with my friends, family or my teddy bear :)”

Sure… He claims that he didn't mind that they were public and that he did it on purpose. Of course it wasn't proof positive that the settings changes are confusing and designed to nudge people out of their privacy into the public eye. Still, some would claim foul.

But why did Zuck suddenly decide to be less private than two months ago, when his settings were uber-private? You couldn’t even friend him before, and you certainly couldn’t see him shirtless..

The fact that Zuck drastically reduced his privacy settings makes me think the Facebook CEO did this accidentally, and now doesn’t want to change back for fear of the resulting PR disaster.

I wonder if Zuckerberg is regretting this move now. He can't go back towards privacy without making it seem that he's a hypocrite. Still, you have to wonder if he's going to start posting less information to his event calendar and photo albums than before since it's been forced for PR reasons to remain public.