geekosystem

Facebook may have experienced truly impressive growth in the first months of 2010, but good press it has not enjoyed: Facebook privacy concerns have gone from a fringe obsession to a mainstream storyline in light of some of Facebook's aggressive changes. It hasn't helped that number of high-profile tech figures such as Peter Rojas and Leo Laporte have quit Facebook to great fanfare.

After one Facebook executive's attempts to answer New York Times readers' questions were by most accounts unsatisfying, Facebook is trying again: This time, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken to the pages of the Washington Post to explain his position and outline the principles on which he says Facebook operates. But his tone isn't especially apologetic:

Just as many threatened to burn their U.S. passports and move to Canada if George W. Bush won the 2004 presidential election, but few followed through when he did, so has been the anti-Facebook backlash: Though every successive wave of privacy-eroding, profit-maximizing innovations prompts lots of threats to quit, deactivate, and delete, not very many people cling to principle at the cost of losing the well-established network of their friends. And there's a weird social cache to being tech-savvy and Doctorovian enough to be, like, pissed off about it: As reporter David Montgomery recently wrote on Twitter, "Complaining about Facebook privacy has joined fixed-gear bikes and ironic facial hair as a hipster trademark." But this afternoon, about as noteworthy a tech media figure as you can find -- Peter Rojas, the founding editor of Gizmodo, Engadget, and gdgt -- announced on Twitter that he was deactivating his Facebook account, prompting a flurry of retweets, baffled replies, and shows of support. Moments later, investor and Infectious Greed writer Paul Kedrosky did the same. Is the great wave of Facebook deactivation, prompted by the ruthless march towards unhideable social metadata inherent in the recently unveiled Facebook Open graph, upon us?