A modern re-working of the children's classic:

Some years ago, there was a merchant prince who was riding the crest of the kingdom's latest social networking craze. The one problem was that his network had grown up to have the same user-privacy issues that plagued his forerunners. One day he heard from two swindlers who told him that they could make the finest privacy controls the world had ever seen. These controls, they said, would not only be highly granular but also extremely easy to use. And, as if that wasn't enough, these controls had a special magical quality in that their value was invisible to anyone who was either stupid, careless, lazy or ill-informed. Being a bit nervous about whether he himself would be able to see the value of these new controls, our young prince first sent two of his trusted men to make evaluations. Of course, neither would admit that they could not see any meaningful value for the users and so praised them. The prince and his trusted advisers then announced that these new controls solved the issues of privacy for all except those too stupid to recognize this or too lazy and careless to be beyond help. The prince and his advisers went on to promote the new controls all over town, never giving into their personal reservations that the new controls were tiresome to use and kinda icky too in the way they expected you to define and distinguish between your friends. In fact they didn't actually really use them themselves but didn't say so because they were afraid that the other people would think them stupid.

Of course, many of the prominent townspeople went out of their way to lavish wild praise on the magnificent controls introduced by the prince, while denying the fact that they knew them to be unwieldy and impracticable too, until some people started saying what was on everyone's mind: "Facebook doesn't give a hoot about your privacy!" This got whispered from person to person until everyone in the crowd was shrugging their shoulders and starting to slip away. The prince noticed this and couldn't help feeling the game was up, but held his head high and continued with his procession, thinking 'what else am I to do'.

And that, dear readers, is the story of one of the ways the overwhelming majority of Facebook users, despite individually recognizing the absurdity of the entire scenario continue to engage with a service they themselves feel has had its day. [Breaking news...And with neat timing, this just in from Pat Phelan on twitter explaining why he has retired from facebook and Robin Blandford too... ]