Editorial: Two-faced Facebook

Saturday, Dec. 15, 2007 | 7:39 a.m.

Social networking Web sites boast about connecting people and about giving them a place to congregate where they can debate, chat and share their views. The sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, reflect the essence of the Internet - anything and everything is fair game.

There is an irony in that fact that has apparently been lost on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Although he is worth - at least on paper - millions of dollars because of his site and its laissez-faire approach to privacy, he doesn't want information about himself online.

A magazine called 02138 wrote a story about Zuckerberg and a lawsuit filed by a few of his former Harvard University classmates. They allege that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook and some programming code from them.

Documents in the lawsuit paint an unflattering picture of Zuckerberg. A judge sealed those documents, but a court clerk mistakenly gave them to a reporter, who used them in the magazine story. The magazine also posted the documents online.

Facebook asked the judge to order the magazine to pull the documents off the Internet, arguing it was an invasion of privacy because the documents included Zuckerberg's Social Security number and his parents' address. The judge refused because the documents were legally obtained and the magazine had redacted the personal data after being alerted to it.

At the same time the company was waging the effort to pull the documents off the Internet, Facebook was ramping up a program to systematically mine information about its users and then broadly distribute that information to advertisers and other users. Widely criticized for not letting people opt out of the program, Zuckerberg finally apologized last month and gave users the option.

The lesson Zuckerberg should learn is that the Internet is a double-edged sword.