NEW YORK — Long ago, when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was in grade school, I wrote a book ("Release 2.1: A Design for Living in the Digital Age") in which I lauded something called gP3h (now p3p), the platform for privacy preferences. I was sure that people would start using P3 or something like it to control access to data about themselves. Of course, I was wrong . . . for about 10 years.
Now, at last, it's starting to happen — though not exactly the way I envisioned it. Nor is it exactly the way Zuckerberg envisioned it.
While many people are up in arms about Facebook's shifting privacy policies, millions of others are calmly managing their reputations online, using the tools that Facebook and other social Web sites provide. In fact, Facebook has helped them learn how to do that.