We know that it's a crocodile

Outrage (and disappointment) is just breaking out over the Facebook "like" button, which allows FB to track not just the browsing habits of its users (which, let's face it, is now most of the online population) but also non-users. According to Arnold Roosendaal's paper (pdf), "the tool is also used to place cookies on the user’s computer, regardless whether a user actually uses the button when visiting a website."

I'm not outraged, I'm not disappointed, I'm not even a bit surprised. Sure, it's a bad thing to do. It's the latest in a series of bad, invasive, privacy-breaching things that Facebook's done. But Facebook's management and investors don't believe in privacy. They really don't. They've said so, err, publicly, lots of times. Mark Z has said it, Peter Thiel has shouted it from the rooftops. 

Occasionally we catch them at it, and occasionally they step back or retract a thing they clearly meant, but really. We keep using a service that we know is run by people who don't believe in privacy. We'll complain about this latest intrusion, but we won't stop using Facebook and we won't take the "like" buttons off our sites. They know it, we know it. Unless we're actually going to stop using it, we've signed up for a social network that will, deliberately and with plenty of warning, take away our privacy as quickly as it can get away with. We know it's a crocodile. We should stop acting surprised when it bites us.