After the recent visit of Mark “I’m the CEO… bitch” Zucker­berg to No. 10 Down­ing Street, Jeremy Hunt, the sec­re­tary of state for cul­ture and media, tweeted:

Just met Mark Zucker­berg, Founder of Face­book. Really smart guy with some good ideas on improve­ment dig­i­tal engage­ment in pol­icy mak­ing. (Source)

Could I please be the 32768^th per­son to say: “Aaaargh! We’re doomed!”

Now I’m sure there was noth­ing par­tic­u­larly sin­is­ter dis­cussed at that meet­ing, but I can’t help the shiv­ers down my spine when I dis­cover that my gov­ern­ment has been tak­ing advice from Facebook.

From News Feeds to Bea­con to Con­nec­tions to the impos­si­bil­ity of quit­ting, Facebook’s pri­vacy is con­tin­u­ally wors­en­ing at a wor­ry­ing rate. (danah boyd rant; scary employee inter­view.) And Zuckerberg’s famously cav­a­lier atti­tude doesn’t help mat­ters either. Face­book are about the only peo­ple I would trust less at the helm of the Labour party’s aborted Überdata­base less than the gov­ern­ment themselves.

Though that said, per­haps Jacqui Smith needn’t have both­ered try­ing to force the Data­base State on us after all — half the pop­u­la­tion (myself included) already signed up for a big­ger, leakier, pri­vately owned one.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to pipe my net con­nec­tion through an SSH tun­nel so Jeremy Hunt can’t see how close I am to fin­ish­ing build­ing my stable.