FACEBOOK Now Faces Privacy Battle

I guess turn about is fair play.  The website Facebook is very often sited as the place where everyone's life is an immediate open book. The gossip website Valleywag decided to give Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg a taste of his own medicine by hiring a photographer to follow him around and give him his own privacy battle.
  Now his life is an also an open book from where he shops to where he lives, eats and more. Here's an article from Fox News on the subject.


June


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Privacy Battle Gets Personal for Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg
By Jeremy A. Kaplan Published August 04, 2010  FoxNews.com

The man who made everyone’s life an open book can no longer leave his house without everyone knowing what car he drives (an Acura TSX), where he hangs out (the Nut House), and what sort of shoes he wears (flip-flops, more often than not).

Welcome, Mark Zuckerberg, to the world you created . . . like it or not.

Citing what it calls the destructive effect that Zuckerberg's creation -- social-networking powerhouse Facebook -- has had on privacy, a website has decided to eliminate his privacy, hiring a photographer to stalk the 26-year-old multibillionaire and publishing photos
of his house, his car, his girlfriend ... his life.

Is turnabout fair play?

"Facebook's CEO doesn't seem too preoccupied about your privacy, or about ours," says Ryan Tate, editor of the gossip website Valleywag, which posted the photographs. "Likewise, we weren't bothered by the notion of tailing him around the Valley for a few days, or about sharing the experience with you....

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"If it feels a little naughty to take such a close look into Zuckerberg's life, remember that this is the executive who pushed the private information of Facebook's hundreds of millions of users progressively further into the public sphere," Tate said.

But some peeps say it's not right to peep on Zuckerberg, and some are calling for Tate's resignation.

"Even if you accept that Facebook’s handling of user privacy was a misstep (which I don’t entirely), to argue that it’s analogous to following someone around with a camera all week and publicizing his home address on the Internet just defies belief," wrote the popular blog Techcrunch.

The pictures on Valleywag document
the surprisingly mundane private life of a young multibillionaire; with $4 billion to his name, Zuckerberg is the 212th richest man in the world, according to Forbes, falling between 81-year-old Swatch watch magnate Nicholas Hayek and 80-year-old Conde Nast owner Donald Newhouse.

Zuckerberg may be rich beyond his dreams, but his life appears to be pedestrian, at best. Valleywag's pictures show him strolling in sneakers in front of his modest home, which he rents. He appears to drive a $20,000 Acura TSX, and he texts his friends from an iPhone.

Read More

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Do you think the website went a little too far by exposing all these details about him? This privacy battle is fought every day about other people on the pages of Facebook, after all. Tell me what you think.


June

Paul Ceglia Files A Lawsuit Following His Arrest

According To The Buzz Log Facebook Owner Mark Zuckerberg admits he signed a contract with Ceglia when he worked for him in 2003. Paul Geglia files a lawsuit stating that he owns 84% of the company. He says he had forgotten all about the contract until he was arrested recently, then he started looking through some old files and found it. It must have felt like buried treasure!

The article below is from an interview on Bloomberg.com

June

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Facebook Would-Be Owner Says He Owes His Claim to Arrest
By Bob Van Voris - Aug 2, 2010 12:01 AM EDT

Paul Ceglia, who claims in a lawsuit that he owns 84 percent of Facebook Inc., said his case wouldn’t have been possible if state troopers hadn’t come to his house in October to arrest him for fraud.

Ceglia’s arrest and a suit by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo two months later, both the result of complaints related to his startup wood-pellet business, got him looking through old files to find assets to pay back customers, he said in an interview in his home in Wellsville, New York. One of those files held a forgotten 2003 contract with Mark Zuckerberg, now chief executive officer of Facebook, he said.

Ceglia, 37, a self-described environmentalist from western New York who wants to legalize drugs and has views on the evils of central banks, claims the contract entitles him to most of the company. If true, the claim, which would give him control of the world’s most-popular social networking service, would be worth about $21 billion, given estimates of the company’s value.

“If this thing hadn’t happened the way it happened, no way I would have ever started looking through these ancient folders,” Ceglia said of his pellet problems. “That contract would just be sitting in there gathering dust.”

In the weeks since Ceglia came to public attention with his lawsuit against Palo Alto, California-based Facebook and Zuckerberg, filed June 30 in New York state court, observers have been asking why he took so long to make his claim. His answer, it turns out, was he forgot about it.

Facebook said a photocopy of the contract, filed as an exhibit to the lawsuit, is a phony.

‘Absurd’

“Ceglia’s claims are absurd and his lawsuit is frivolous, if not outright fraudulent,” Facebook said in an e-mailed statement. “Ceglia has refused to produce the original contract and the copy we’ve seen is a forgery, with inconsistent margin sizes, inconsistent font sizes, and other glaring discrepancies,” the company said.

Ceglia, one of whose lawyers said the original is in a safe place, said he is eager to take on Zuckerberg, 26, and let a jury decide whether the contract is genuine.

“I’m coming after him,” Ceglia said. “A deal’s a deal.”

Read More

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Isn't it strange that this "deal" was entirely forgotten for so many years? Paul Ceglia files a lawsuit 7 years later and Mark Zuckerberg doesn't remember signing ownership away. It's going to get interesting!

June