Facebook is among the most powerful internet companies – maybe the most powerful together with Google – in the world.

It has 400m users, 35m of whom use it at least once a day. It is the most visited website in the US. Its initial public offering, which is expected within a year or two, would be the biggest Silicon Valley event since Google’s IPO in 2004.

Facebook is thus important not only to investors but to everyone interested in the future of the internet, which is practically all of us. If it decides, in Google’s phrase for deceiving or messing around with its customers, to “be evil” then millions feel the effects.

Unfortunately, Mark Zuckerberg, the 25-year-old who founded Facebook as a private social network for Harvard students, has recently been displaying a disregard bordering on disdain for Facebook users’ right to maintain control over personal information...

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