Nobody Is Immune To The Complexities Of Facebook Privacy Policies – Isn’t It Ironic?

Now for those old enough to remember, Canadian singer Alanis Morissette was brought to account many years ago when people questioned the lyrics of her hit song, “Isn't It Ironic” – many of us thought that the various examples she gave were more those of bad luck as opposed to true irony. For example, “…isn't it ironic... don't you think. It's like rain on your wedding day…” – just plain old bad luck, but certainly not irony in my mind.

What is ironic however, is the fact that the older sister of Mark Zuckerberg (he, of Facebook founder fame) got caught up by the social network’s privacy settings. Even more surprising, is that Randi Zuckerberg then got embroiled in a debate about ‘online etiquette’.

Randi has become somewhat a celebrity in her own right, after she quit her job managing Facebook public relations to pursue the launch of a Silicon Valley themed online reality show.

This latest online debacle began when she posted a family photo on Facebook (above). The post was intended only for those people on her friends list, but inadvertently ended up going public and subsequently, viral.

The picture can now be found just about anywhere across the world wide web and shows Mark Zuckerberg and family members in the kitchen who are ‘hamming up’ their reactions to messages with the latest FB feature, "Poke".

For those who live in a vacuum and are not already aware, ‘Poke’ lets people send messages that end up ‘self-destructing’. Many people have alleged that the ‘Poke’ feature is designed for "sexting" and for sending ‘private’ (*nudge nudge, wink wink*) pictures… you see, the senders can have them quickly erased.

The problem that Randi ran into with her family picture on Facebook, was that she posted it for those people on her friends list only, however it also ended up being shared on the timelines of ‘friends of friends’ (the people she had tagged in the picture).

So isn’t ironic (again) that the image then ended up getting posted on Twitter. The rest, as they say, is history… Randi Zuckerberg was clearly not happy with this turn events, as she tweeted, "Digital etiquette: always ask permission before posting a friend's photo publicly… It's not just about privacy settings, it's about human decency."

Heated debate then raged on at Twitter and hundreds of forums – the most common response was that after the way that Facebook handles the privacy of its users, this is ‘poetic justice’ – I call it irony.

Randi has since tweeted that the whole topic of online etiquette elicits "passion, debate, anger & Twitter crazies", and she is thinking of making it the next subject on her reality show.

Since I am now well down the path of obviously not having any ‘digital etiquette’ myself (by posting the picture in question above), then I may as well go one step further… the following are some candid photographs of Mark Zuckerberg with his partner Priscilla and dog, ‘Beast’. I didn’t take the pictures – so please ‘don’t hate the player, hate the game’: