Mark, I've made many edits below after consulting with Elliot. I know no one reads these any more, but for now we still have to at least look like we care, so better look this over carefully and fix it up a bit before you post it. -Ted

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You guys are a bunch of ungrateful whiny-ass titty-baby Luddites. Seriously. You should have stopped us while you still had a chance. The Age of Privacy is Over. WE PWN YOU.

It has been a great year so far for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, almost a billion people (pretty much everyone who can still afford a computer) around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we are focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information with advertisers, data brokers, ex-lovers and stalkers, potential employers and insurers, fraudsters, and identity thieves. Starting with the very first version of Facebook over five years ago, we've built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. We can pay lip service to privacy with the best of them. Facebook takes its commitment to privacy seriously seriously. Our work to improve our bottom line privacy continues today.

Facebook has been called a cult, and a virus. But really, there just a few guidelines we like to follow to optimize the service for our stakeholders.

All web services occasionally have to change their governing documents to accommodate new products. They just may not tell you about these changes, much less give you advance notice.

Last December, we made several changes reinforcing the new social norms that we want to roll out to the world, primarily making more of your personal information public so you can connect with our advertisers better.

Following that, the changes we made in March let the wonderful Facebook experience follow you on the web wherever you go.

As you can see, we've been making major changes to our privacy policy every three months. This is for two important reasons. First, it keeps most users of the site from ever fully understanding how things work before we change again it keeps the Facebook experience fresh and exciting. Second, we can claim to the regulators and investigators here and abroad that this time we've addressed whatever it is they complained about last time, and it will take them longer than three months to figure out that we made it worse. So basically, we're now untouchable. We can do whatever we want to do to optimize our business model and nothing can stand in the way. it enables new kinds of interesting ways for you to interact with Facebook and its partners.

Once again, we're giving you notice and beginning the process of ignoring listening to your feedback. You know you're powerless, just look at how fewer and fewer people even bother to comment each time we screw you over. We're proposing another set of revisions to our Privacy Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (while they still exist) to make way for some exciting new products we're contemplating. Not all of these products have been finalized and many aren't yet built at all. However, we've definitely identified some interesting opportunities to improve the way you share and connect with oppressive governments the people and things in your life.

So, today, we explain some of these transformative policy changes, and sometime soon—when we're done striking deals to increase our "share price" designing and coding—we'll have more product details to announce.

It is important to note that, while we're still developing many aspects of these products, user control over pretty much nothing privacy remains essential to our innovation process and we'll continue to distract you with panem et circenses like Farmville while we continue to build our Death Star develop new tools to help you maximize control the things you share on Facebook.

As always, we encourage you to review the newest proposed changes in their entirety and provide your own thoughts on the Facebook Site Governance Page. Here are some of the biggest updates, a few of which are simply clarifications or further explanations of things that already happen today:

Enhanced Login

Extensive user experience studies we've conducted show that if more than one click is required to complete an operation, most people don't bother. We already buried the logout in a menu and no one logs out anymore. We're streamlining things and removing the logout function to keep your Facebook presence and experience alive wherever you go. You can still log out of course, by clearing your cookies, but who does that? Keeping users logged in will vastly improve our ability to surveille people's actions all over the web using the off-site connection technologies we announced in March.

Premium Accounts

We're launching trial premium accounts, which are invite-only for now (and forever) for an enhanced experience. We'll be sure to share more (NOT!) as the trial proceeds. Available only for Facebook executives, investors, and a privileged few who are invited personally by me and able to pay the premium, currently set at US$10 million, the premium account provides a truly private, always encrypted connection without the cookies, ads, silly apps, and other stuff we throw at the unwashed masses.

Richer Profiles

We'll be re-instating our original policy of gathering additional information about you from other sources to make your Facebook experience richer and more rewarding as you connect to your friends and to other places and things across the internet.

Mark, don't mention this to anyone - we'll bury a vague notice somewhere in the fine print...

Enhanced Presence

We're implementing Flash, Silverlight, and HTML5 local shared objects to better track use of the site with the few users that do clear cookies. We're also implementing some code that intelligently analyzes browser signatures to determine likely user identities for non-logged-in browsers. And of course we're also implementing browser history sniffing to better track visits to the few sites that haven't yet implemented any of our other tracking codes.

Mark, don't mention this either right now - we'll just do it when we're fully ready and by then we won't need to do these silly blog posts...

Enhanced Identity

Facebook is close to deals with the US Social Security Administration and other organizations globally to merge our online profiles with real world identities. This will allow us to provide the kinds of very customized information to you on the web, and around town, that we know you will find valuable.

I know what's good for Facebook, I know what's good for America, I know what's good for the world, and I certainly I know what's good for you... better than you do. Arrogant? No. Just too big to fail. Look kids, it's my way or the highway. We've worked hard to build complexity controls that we think will be better for us you, but we also understand that everyone's needs are different. Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.

Mark Zuckerberg is CEO and Co-Founder of Facebook.