Facebook’s new privacy policy started, and Gawker went to Zuckerberg’s Facebook page and saw, grabbed, and published tons of photos of him huggy a teddy bear with a bong next to him and many other photos that aren’t professional or publicist approved.

Zuckerberg is the lead figure for Facebook and its founder and a millionaire, so there’s no HR department to deny him a job and no prospective mother-in-law to tell him to stop courting her progeny on the basis on those photos.

And yet, nevertheless, after the policy changed to being wide open and the pics were published, Zuckerberg decided to remove huge sections of his profile and his photos.

So talking about a new norm and expressing surprise at how everyone really wants it is really specious on its face. He obviously didn’t want his pics out there, he didn’t understand himself how wide open the policy was when he got the memo or sat through the meeting, and he immediately did an about face with his privacy settings to remove things he wants to share with friends from public view.

He himself experience the shock and embarrassment that many of the Facebook userbase went through. Tech journalists should point this out and ask him on a personal level about how Facebook should behave with other people who may have a higher cost than he has.

He basically is invulnerable to many of the modern problems of a public life except to embarrassment, and even then he didn’t let his personal and private photos continue to be published widely on his profile.

When people lose jobs, relationships and opportunities — or fear their loss — because of information and photos revealed by a social networking site changing its privacy policies without notice — it’s really hard to stomach that the multi-millionare 20something founder says privacy doesn’t matter anymore when he has nothing to lose and still won’t be an example of the kind of carefree attitude towards personal and private information that he says is the new norm.

If the founder of Facebook can’t handle the new privacy policies, why should everyone else?

1. how would “free individuals” collectively assert their preference to Facebook — or anyone else — in such a way that it would result in the same outcome as Zuckerberg’s decision? That is, you say “In a free society, it should be the citizens who drive the push toward more open data, not a few elite power players who force the issue.”

Is that not already the case evidenced by people’s behavior, rather than, say, a popular uprising? Given that Facebook controls the design of the site — and their source code and user experience is not user-maleable or writable — shouldn’t Facebook be responding to the behavior patterns of its users, rather than dictated by verbal arguments?

2. For what it’s worth, as a private company, Facebook can basically do whatever they want. They are specifically not a government (though they have a substantially large constituency to serve/appease) and need not behave as one. The only constitution guiding their behavior is the terms of service and privacy policy, which they reserve the right to change at any time (albeit with some quasi-democratic voting procedure).

3. You can always quit Facebook, or ever delete your account. Or heck, never even sign up. You’re assigned a government based on where you’re born. It seems to me that free choice is preserved simply by that fact — and if you choose to live under the rules set by Facebook, Inc., you’ve done so freely — bearing whatever consequences that decision may result in.

ON THE OTHER HAND, I do think there are valid cases where companies and the government have it as part of their duty to make that which is private known, as it is also part of their duty to keep things private. Where do we draw these lines? I don’t think it’s always simple.