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Subbing for Matt Yglesias, Dara Lind is a relative late-comer to the recent bandwagon of Facebook privacy critics. Unlike most of the “Facebook is EVIL!!!” crowd, Lind takes the somewhat novel approach that it is Mark Zuckerberg’s class and gender elitism which is to blame for Facebook’s dubious approach to privacy:

Zuckerberg seems to think that full publicity is the inevitable future. He said in January that “people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” The problem is that actual social science research shows this isn’t true. The Pew Research Center reported this week that (in the words of Web-sociology guru danah boyd) “young adults are more actively engaged in managing what they share online than older adults.” Surely Facebook, if it wanted, could figure out that its line about a youth-driven juggernaut toward publicity isn’t borne out by the data — it’s not like it doesn’t have the user data of hundreds of millions of users at its fingertips. So what gives?

I suspect that while Zuckerberg spins publicity as a social good, he actually believes it’s a moral one. It’s a theme that’s become pretty common among execs of data-collecting, data-publicizing companies: making it so that anything anyone does can be seen by anyone they know is a way of keeping them honest.

These complaints generally follow the pattern of “I trusted Facebook with my personal information, and now they have betrayed that trust by making it public!” Lind’s version of the complaint attributes this betrayal to a different motivation than simple greed, but it’s the same basic idea.

All of these criticisms, as well as what has become a relatively well-established tradition of pointless protests from Facebook’s user-base every time there is a change to the UI, stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of what Facebook is, and of what its relationship to its users is.

The misunderstanding is this: Facebook users tend to think that they are Facebook’s customers, but in fact, they are Facebook’s product. The company doesn’t exist to provide you a means to stay in touch with your friends and meet new ones, it exists to sell advertising. Facebook creates a bunch services and features to attract users, these users put a bunch of personal information into Facebook, and Facebook sells access to those users to advertisers. Sure, there is a risk that they will make a change that drives away so many users that their product (i.e., their userbase) becomes less valuable, but that strikes me as being a business problem, not a moral problem

I guess my question for everyone suddenly piling on the Facebook-hate is, what did you expect, and why? It has been pretty clear all along that the whole point of their business model was to make information public, and they have been relatively up-front about the fact that their terms of service were subject to change at any time.