So yesterday the apologies started to flow from Mark Zuckerberg over this so-called mishandling of the whole Beacon fiasco and how they had handled the whole situation so badly.

Give me a break - the only thing that Zuckerberg is sorry about is that they couldn’t pull off the biggest scam going and that their billions might be endangered as advertisers began stepping back to see if the Facebook money train would still be on the rails once the dust has settled.

The fact is that if Zuckerberg and crew had really given a shit about the millions of people that make up Facebook and are the fodder for their advertising cash cow the whole Beacon thing would have been transparent and opt-in from day one. But no .. instead Zuckerberg treated the members of Facebook just like the dumb cows he thinks they are and in the spirit of their we own everything TOS made it so everyone was opted in to the system and with no apparent way to opt out.

Even though they tried to couch the whole idea in a bunch of webbish 2.0 philosophy of openness is the way to go the fact is that they were only concerned with making as many hooks as possible available for advertisers to get their message out and for Facebook to reel in the dollars.

While Mathew Ingram looks upon this as a case of deja vu - a replay of the fuss created over the Facebook News Feeds and how some felt this was pushing the bounds of privacy invasion I just see it as another example of the ongoing attitude that Facebook has about its members. And while Robert Scoble might find admiration in Zuckerberg admitting mistakes the reality is he had no choice. As a matter of fact he had $15Billion reasons why he had to haul his ass out of the Facebook ivory tower and make nice noises.

No matter how you look at there isn’t a part of Facebook that isn’t troubled. From the accusations of stolen ideas and code to privacy issues with the News Feeds and Beacon; which according to Brian Solis; pointing to a TechCrunch report, hasn’t changed since it appears the data of people that supposedly have opted out of Beacon is still being sent to Facebook in mass dumps by advertisers.

What gets me as well is that as much as I understand that the whole Web 2.0 success story is based on young javascript jockeys getting a great idea and getting potentially very rich in the process here we have a 23 year old with a boat load of ethical questions following him around running a 15 Billion Dollar company. Executives can go through their whole careers without even coming close to running that kind of company and here we have Zuckerberg doing it almost over night with no experience.

With all that is hanging over him and the questions that never seem to get answered properly would you even buy a used car from Mark Zuckerberg?

And if not why are you trusting him with all your personal information?

Or is it a case like ParisLemon points out - in a few months nobody will care

Listening to: Bootsy Collins/Fatboy Slim - The Greatest Hits: Why Try Harder - Weapon of Choice

Conversation Tags: Facebook, accountability, Beacon, Mark Zuckerberg