Despite a recent blogoplex flap over whether Zuckerberg cares about privacy, it doesn’t matter if he actually does or doesn’t. Figuring out if he is a privacy devotee is like trying to read tea leaves. It doesn’t help, and it doesn’t matter. In the end, Facebook can’t care deeply about privacy. A company can’t care deeply about the privacy of its users if its business is predicated on selling it. Any business dependent on advertising must sell what it knows about its users.

Whatever pro-privacy beliefs Zuckerberg himself might have, the market has forced him to give them up. In social media, to generate more revenue from your eyeballs, there will always be a Race to the Privacy Bottom: the next entrepreneur will be willing to sell more of your privacy than the last, which will force the market to keep reducing protection for privacy until it’s finally and totally eroded. Count on it like you count on spring rain.

It’s a similar waste of commentator time to point to user behavior on Facebook and elsewhere, wave our hands around, and say that social norms are changing drastically that users don’t care about privacy any longer. Of course users care about privacy. That’s why sites like advertising-driven sites Facebook make opt-in the default setting whenever they change their privacy policies or features. That’s why advertising-driven sites like Facebook make it hard for users to opt out of those changes.

Even very smart tech writers are having a hard time succinctly explaining how to walk users through opting out of Facebook’s most recent changes. The dials to reverse (most–can’t reverse them all!) the latest Facebook changes are difficult to find and ponderous to change, ’cause you gotta do them one by one. Sites like Facebook make sweeping Forced Opt-In Default changes because they know that giving users an upfront opportunity to opt out will drastically reduce the adoption, which will drastically reduce revenue growth potential. In fact, a Forced Opt-In Default is the surest sign that we know that users, when given a choice, will opt for more privacy.

What’s worrisome to me is when a company invites you to deposit a huge amount of information with it under one set of privacy rules and then moves the goalposts on you. On Day One they make one set of promises, on Day Ten another, and by Day 100 they change the rules again. (At least one set of writers have predicted what will happen in the next twenty years in FB privacy.) Whenever the company makes a change, it gives you no easy and  friction-free way to reverse it. In fact, it exclusively greases the wheels the other way.

A cynic would say that they are inviting you to participate under false pretenses and then trouncing you with the old bait and switch. We already know that credit card companies, banks, and insurance companies try to do this routinely. All of us have received lengthy, tiny-print mailers that supposedly explain changes in our credit, our interest rates, and our coverage. Those mailers are impossible to read. It takes a JD/PhD to get through the first paragraph. But we are probably comforted by the fact that credit card companies, banks, and insurers are all regulated to some degree: they have to play within certain rules. Imagine if your bank acted like an Internet company and one day simply announced that it was going to publish your bank balance along with everyone else’s because “people don’t care about privacy any more.”

For nearly the first time, it seems, the Senate, not usually the fastest-twitch muscle in the American technical landscape, is lumbering awake to the topic of privacy and the Internet. Senators Schumer and Franken have asked Facebook to “provide [users] with full control over their personal information.” One wonders aloud if the FTC is long to follow.

How many other kinds of company can get customers to use their product under one set of assumptions and then change the rules after every meal? How would that look in other industries?

Restaurant: Thank you for ordering your steak! The kitchen has changed its mind and is giving you this plate of chicken. And we’ve just raised the prices by 50%!

Automotive: From now on, the car you purchased will run in reverse!

Healthcare: Your surgery will be televised! Hooray!

Entertainment: Halfway through the movie, the director reveals that he’s been filming the audience the whole time and that the footage will be his next movie.

Credit cards: The CEO has waved his Magic Kingstick: you will now need to pay 100% of your balance every day! (Well, weird: don’t credit card companies actually do that? Yes, and they just got more regulated for exactly that reason.)

My suggestion: let’s stop twiddling our thumbs worrying about whether this or that executive of this or that social media company “cares” about privacy. He can’t. If you’re selling your users’ data, you can’t care about their privacy.

Now let’s figure out what to do about it.