Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg says privacy is no longer a "social norm." Why not just say life is no longer worth living, Mark?

To me, privacy is a treasure, a jewel, a certificate of being human. To him, it's an obstacle in his efforts to become a billionaire. There's a chasm between us, and it doesn't sound as though he wants to start assembling his side of the bridge.

"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information —and different kinds — but more openly and with more people," Zuckerberg told a San Francisco tech awards conference recently.

It sounds like something those louche people say when campaigning to lower the age of consent.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg addressing a conference in July 2008. (Eric Risberg/Associated Press)

Well, yes, people have gotten comfortable, and many of them have ended up dead/divorced/unemployed and, at the very least, permanently embarrassed as a result of what they posted online.

But they're collateral damage to the man who invented a new way for naïve people to suffer as well as triumph.

Zuckerberg, who is 26 but seems 10 years younger in his ability to predict personal risk, is, to put it kindly, a young, moneyed idiot.

I'll take him over an old, moneyed puppet master like Rupert Murdoch any day, but that doesn't excuse him.

Zuckerberg missed further education, his sudden success causing him to drop out of Harvard, so he likely won't have read Weber and Durkheim on anomie (social alienation), or Orwell on surveillance, or even the great novelist Ruth Rendell, who has spent her life writing about the extremes of human secrecy.

In other words, he hasn't been terrified by certain ideas.

Typing away

It is the sinister, paranoid, pallid flat-dwellers who populate Rendell's novels that are the dark side of the online world.

We wouldn't have heard from these people before. They crouch in their holes typing away. Some of them are stalkers. Some of them are stalking me.

These people are, indeed, remaking social norms, but not in the friendly, relaxed, power-for-good way Zuckerberg imagines.

Privacy is the most intense and permanent of humanity's social norms. Yet Facebook says we are eager to fling it away. It claims to have more than 350 million active users, half of whom visit the site each day.

Its reach is truly global. Via Facebook, you can link to every possible form of self-exposure.

Facebook does seem harmless compared to the massive intrusions of government and its offshoots in an era of renewed terrorism. You can do great things with Facebook, and forming the group Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament is one of them.

If we don't have a House of Commons and our MPs can't represent us, then a Facebook group is the next best thing. (Although such a failure of democracy does rather make me feel that Canada has become Burma.)

But, I love my privacy, mainly because its violation frightens me.

At the moment, I have two Single White Female situations. My stalkers are free to walk up and down my street, which is why I sewed new blinds for the front of my house.

When Google Street View began filming the city, I planted new trees in my front garden and stayed indoors. After I received numerous death threats from online readers, urged on by Fox News, in response to a column I wrote, the University of Toronto kindly assigned me undercover police officers at the class I teach. My phone number is unlisted, and I'm hard to reach online.

At the airport, I will request a pat-down rather than go through the machine that displays me naked to a security person. I pay cash when buying things that I don't want Shoppers Drug Mart to send me samples of (yes, that Optimum card reveals a lot about you).

I have an office paper shredder and never give out my phone number.

What does this make me? An outlier and a freak for being attached to privacy, both literal and conceptual. The quote from Zuckerberg makes anyone who disagrees with him sound laughably old-fashioned.

Not my friend

The problem with Facebook is its use of the word "friends."

Users don't distinguish between business contacts/acquaintances and genuine friends. This explains why the average user has 130 "friends," many of whom will be strangers.

Many people have thousands of "friends," and they're proud of it because they think it makes them into celebrities. They are Facebook famous. They love being photographed naked at the airport or being overheard on their cellphone, they think all email is interesting and are casual about online security.

The novelist P.G. Wodehouse once invented a public school character named Psmith, a distinctly odd young man who I imagine looked like the actor Steve Buscemi — long, languorous and wet-eyed. Psmith made a false confession to his headmaster.

"What induced you to do such a thing?" he was asked.

Psmith sighed softly. "The craze of notoriety, sir," he replied sadly. "The curse of the modern age."

Wodehouse wrote this novel in 1908. Little did he know he was presaging a modern hell a century hence, and it's the place in which I live.

Surely, even Zuckerberg felt a tremor of doubt about what he had wrought when a 2004 copyright lawsuit, which Facebook paid $65 million US to settle, caused Zuckerberg's social security number and the home address of his parents and girlfriend to be published online.

He tried to get the information removed, but a court rejected his request, and he failed.

I don't know what Zuckerberg's family thought. Money is like white paint; it will cover the most extraordinary flaws, and he was doubtless forgiven.

But I recently read a story in the Toronto Star about the actress Halle Berry, who was escorted past a long lineup at Montreal's airport by a courteous police officer. Other passengers were enraged, particularly when they saw Berry and her husband seated in first class on the plane.

"They are not diplomats or heads of state," one blogger complained.

In other words, Berry's fame made her fair game. Even though waiting in line being pestered by hundreds of people would have been frightening and arduous, Berry should have no expectation of privacy.

This is the outgrowth of the quest for notoriety. If I have a blog, I am famous, that blogger thinks. If people read my blog in which I punish a movie star for her success, I will become a star myself. If I post a video of my child misbehaving on YouTube, I'll be a viral hit and get my own reality show.

And so on and so on.

Privacy as a social norm has been bending for decades. It is now almost broken. No one, not the poor, the rich, the inattentive, can hold onto this thin reed called human dignity.