A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an interview with Google‘s CEO Eric Schmidt. It delved into a number of things like the Verizon deal and Schmidt’s excitement for Minority Report-style “targeted advertisement,” but the folks at the Telegraph noticed a truly interesting quote nestled unto the discussion. Schmidt apparently believes that, as time goes on and we reach a point where every single person has embarrassing information and pictures from their adolescence posted on social media sites online, it will become commonplace for people to automatically change their name once they reach adulthood.

I read Mark Zuckerberg’s op-ed in today’s Washington Post with an open mind op-ed, interested to see how he would confront and react to the Facebook privacy criticism. As I read it, I became confused — because it didn’t read like an op-ed, it read like an op-ad.

One gets the sense the clock is ticking on Facebook’s fast and loose ways of forcing people to share information about themselves they might not otherwise wish to make public. Which may explain the immediately negative reaction to an old IM chat that was apparently leaked to Business Insider earlier today.

If you were one of several hundred users on Facebook last night, your Inbox may have been flooded by some strange messages, none of which were intended for you. During a routine coding update, some users noticed what at first appeared to be a hack, as they began receiving messages from people they didn’t know…some of them personal in nature.

Despite the fact it looks like Facebook has shored up many of its new privacy setting issues which drew red flags when they were unveiled last week, the public fallout continues. Seems that those easily overlooked 350,000 people who actually took the time to figure out the privacy settings and apply them are none to happy with the arbitrary nature with which their control over their personal information was suddenly removed. Also, a lot of them work in media.

Facebook users logging in since last night have been greeted by an open letter from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg outlining a sweeping set of changes to the site. Regional networks are officially dead and gone, and privacy settings are getting a major shakeup. The 18,000+ comments on Zuckerberg’s note tend towards favorable, but one, somewhat unrelated question keeps popping up: where’s the dislike button?