Hey Facebook, this data is mine!

This entire episode raises important questions about who owns our data online. Is it we the users, the social media companies, or someone else?

A secondary question is just as important: if we don't own our online information, can it be sold by someone else for their own profit?

Facebook is not the only group that is has a cavalier attitude to its customers' privacy. Google CEO Eric Schmidt was criticised a few years back for suggesting that anyone concerned about online privacy was trying to hide something.

Since then, of course, the European Court of Justice has ruled that people have the 'right to be forgotten' by Google – and, presumably, by other search engines.

As a result, Google is setting up measures by which internet users can request the removal of certain information about themselves from search results. It's revealing, though, that Google began to do so only when it was given no other choice.

Challenges to privacy are, by extension, challenges to personal autonomy and our ability to make free choices. Studies have shown just how highly susceptible human beings are to the pressures of social acculturation.

We may think ourselves totally independent thinkers, but the research suggests that we are heavily influenced by the prevailing norms around us.

Hence the modern preoccupation among politicos and advertisers with so-called nudge marketing. This involves the notion that entrenched human behaviour patterns can be changed by suggesting that alternative patterns have become the norm.

Sensitivity to peer pressure, it seems, is not something we completely grow out of once we leave puberty behind.

A level of control over our privacy is necessary if we're to make good choices – or at least choices that are made after weighing the options for ourselves, rather than simply going with the flow.

Few of us will take the same care in judging a situation if we're aware that others are looking over our shoulders, whether they be neighbours, politicians, bureaucrats, corporate heads or technocrats.

On the evidence to hand, Mr. Zuckerberg seems to be more careful with his own privacy than he is with those who use Facebook.