Althought I agree with you (well, I prefer Fred Stutzman’s take): Facebook cannot claim to ask a licence for just sharing info, as they do much more anlysis than that— I disagree with both the assumption that Facebook has been repeatedly dishonnest in taking that road, and that a moral charter will be used a mockery against them.

Zuckerberg always recognized his users’ concerns: if anything, he is the first guy to be a billionnaire both by accident, and by always acknowledging his mistakes the day after (and begging for a week of mercy and intense re-developing). When his fellow billionaires unapologetically drive the economy to the ground, that doesn’t sound too bad. I’m not the biggest fan of flipflops in the boardroom, but his relatively low-key approach (Yes, he is an obnoxious ivy fratboy, but I’m talking: by CEO standards) allows him to suggest counter-intuitive change. In spite of the massive uproar, he promissed the NewsFeed would end up being an important feature — and he was both right in promissing that the issues came from bad privacy settings (from Fb side) and right in promissing to kill the program soon if it failed to please. That promiss to go back isn’t void: he effectively killed the (opt-out) threat from Beacon, he did reverse the ToS; Facebook did join OpenID. They still have to implement OAuth — but so far, they are trying hard enough to be given a the week that they are asking for.

Employees at Google are not victim of the moral burden of their firm’s motto : it’s an objective, and a reason to raise the head — when they had difficult decisions to make, that goal helped them sort the issues.* With critics as loud as Mark Canter, I can’t imagine someone sneaking too much actual crap; neither do I think the praises from David Recordon and Chris Messina can be undeserved.

* [I know you are going to mention censorship in China, so let me paste a disclaimer that too many critics never seem to consider: I beleive they did the right thing. Annoying users by forcing them to see something politically painful would have been counter-productive. The closest comparison that I can think of would have been to feature a copy of Mein Kampf on every request from German users with words included in that book; albeit teaching that tragedy is necessary, making it an offensive burden is not helpful. It would do nothing but encourage hatred from a dangerous fringe — and the Chinese nationalists are no less threatening than most hatemongers. On the other side, Google knows how many users needed their presence in China to track the temporary proxies needed to actually circumvent the Great FireWall. They were in the unique position to be able to measure how many requests they had for political subject and technical help. They made an informed decision. De facto, they allow both by making the later easier, and made it possible to circumvent ISPs control. So I beleive that they did the right thing, and that critics are just the usual ethnocentrics.]