The pressing question is actually: ‘How Will Facebook pass the EU’s Privacy Test?’

There are fairly strict Data Protection laws in the UK, for example.

Here are a few:

* Data may only be used for the specific purposes for which it was collected.

* Data must not be disclosed to other parties without the consent of the individual whom it is about, unless there is legislation or other overriding legitimate reason to share the information (for example, the prevention or detection of crime). It is an offence for Other Parties to obtain this personal data without authorisation.

* Individuals have a right of access to the information held about them, subject to certain exceptions (for example, information held for the prevention or detection of crime).

* Personal information may be kept for no longer than is necessary.

* Personal information may not be transmitted outside the EEA unless the individual whom it is about has consented or adequate protection is in place, for example by the use of a prescribed form of contract to govern the transmission of the data.

* Subject to some exceptions for organisations that only do very simple processing, and for domestic use, all entities that process personal information must register with the Information Commissioner.

* Entities holding personal information are required to have adequate security measures in place. Those include technical measures (such as firewalls) and organisational measures (such as staff training).

Culled from a really comprehensive post on Mashable here:
http://mashable.com/2007/11/09/facebook-asks-can-we-see-your-id/

My offer of £7.50 per month for a Facebook subscription without ads now seems a little… foolish. What’s the point if agreeing to the Terms of Use mean that the privacy laws designed to protect me above, cannot.

Hmm…

Having said that, it will be interesting to see how Facebook’s core demographic take to the ads.

It is quite possible that they might not care.

Mark Zuckerberg may have his hand on the wheel at Facebook, but never forget that his subscribers also have the option of changing their traffic patterns, and that will most certainly affect the future path of the SS Facebook as well.

I was once a loyal CompuServe member (73067,1500) in the pre-Web days, happily paying by the minute for 2400 baud access to the OS/2 and Canopus forums. But times changed, and after a few months of using the Web and leaving my CompuServe account dormant, I closed the account — it just wasn’t relevant any more. And today it seems impossible to imagine a world without Facebook, but fads come and go — and with a few wrong turns, the site could implode in favour of the next big thing, and then we’ll be reminscing about the good old Web 2.0 days of Facebook.

Perhaps by then it will be just another answer in the 2010 version of Trivial Pursuit .. “What Social networking site got its start in 2004 at Harvard ..”

Mark will do fine.