Privacy: Yours, Mine, and Mark Zuckerberg's

          The notoriously private Mark Zuckerberg, the boy genius who imagined Facebook into existence, is famous for having observed that the age of privacy is over.  In every way imaginable, we sign off on privacy when we post our breakfast menus on his website.  And that's fine, Zuckerberg says, it's the way things are in the 21st century.  Get used to it.  And judging by the wholesale internet intrusions into our lives and the way we shrug it all off, he may be right.  We don't seem to care much for privacy any more.

          But Zuckerberg sure does.  He recently bought four properties around the one he owns and lives in in an exclusive area of Palo Alto, CA for a whopping $30 million, a drop in the bucket to the young man worth a reported $19 billion.  All to make sure he keeps his own privacy.  He has no plans for the properties and in fact is leasing them back to the former owners, who are now tenants and no longer a threat to the peace and quiet (and privacy) necessary for the good life.  Zuckerberg's, that is.  What's next for the mega compound?  Maybe a twelve-foot fence with razor wire.  That ought to keep out the undesirables.

          The age of privacy is clearly not over for the founder of Facebook, just for us.