Gawker follows Mark Zuckerberg for week, publishes pics in privacy protest

US media blog Gawker has published a series of intrusive photographs of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, claiming it did so to highlight privacy concerns on the social networking site.

Under the headline "Mark Zuckerberg gets the paparazzi treatment" the site explained they had a photographer follow the world's youngest billionaire around his Silicon Valley neighbourhood for a weekend.

The 26-year-old is seen with friends, his sister and his girlfriend - and spending a large amount of time checking his iPhone.

The site also published photographs of Zuckerberg's house and car.

"If it feels a little naughty to take such a close look into Zuckerberg's life, remember that this is the executive who pushed the private information of Facebook's hundreds of millions of users progressively further into the public sphere," journalist Ryan Tate wrote in the article accompanying the photos.
"Facebook's CEO doesn't seem too preoccupied about your privacy, or about ours.

"Likewise, we weren't bothered by the notion of tailing him around the Valley for a few days, or about sharing the experience with you. Enjoy."

Just last week the account details for more than 100 million Facebook users were made public.

The personal information, harvested from publicly available information held in Facebook’s open access directory, was made available for download on a torrent or filesharing site.

The social networking site has more than 500 million users and earlier this year there was a storm of protest over the complexity of its privacy settings.

As a result, the site simplified the system, but Facebook's privacy policy has grown significantly over time and is now longer than the United States Constitution.

Zuckerberg's net worth is valued at US$4 billion due to his 24 per cent share of Facebook.