The story broke on Sunday in Consumerist (a website recently sold by Gawker Media to the publisher of Consumer Reports): Facebook had changed its terms of service to say it would retain data even after users deleted their accounts! The scandalous implication: Facebook intended to keep all of its information on us, for ever and ever and ever — every last poke and Wall post and comment and photo and video.

From there, it spread to Tumblr and Twitter. By Monday, it was on Techmeme, a headline-aggregation site obsessively monitored by tech bloggers.

By that evening, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's response — that Facebook users "own and control" their information — was gaining traction. But it still didn't quiet the blogosphere storm. Late last night, Zuckerberg bowed to the bloggers and retracted Facebook's revision to its terms of service, promising a further revision.

What did the storm accomplish? Facebook's terms of service no longer claim rights to a user's data after account deletion — though Facebook in fact continues to retain that information (for example, in a copy of a Facebook message sent by the former user which remains in a current user's inbox).

All that has changed is words, not actions. But the bloggers who so strongly protested Facebook's new terms of service can't very well complain about the old ones, since they lived under those for months or years without complaint.

And in reality, how many people were actually upset? 91,000 people joined a protest group. That's 0.05 percent of Facebook's population.

Amid this PR storm, no one has pointed out the real issue here, which is that the guy masterminding these legal changes is Ted Ullyot, who previously worked in the Bush Administration under then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, surrounded by coworkers who unabashedly defended torture and shredded the Bill of Rights. Amazing, isn't it, that people are talking about a site's legal boilerplate, rather than the guy who Zuckerberg picked to enforce it?

(Photoillustration via Ideagrove)

Ullyot was a "member of the class of 1989," a Harvard employee told me, but he did not get his degree until 1990. He graduated magna cum laude, but the delay seems curious. Especially since Ullyot's dad, James Ullyot, is a prominent Harvard graduate himself, and is now president of the Harvard Alumni Association. Harvard, like all Ivy League colleges, strives to make room for influential graduates' children.

Even more curious: Ullyot was two classes behind Sandberg, who graduated — on time, as best we can tell — in 1991. But Sandberg's husband, former Yahoo executive Dave Goldberg, was in the class of '89 with Ullyot. Could that be the connection that landed him the job? If so, just more proof that Harvard connections pay off.

The problem is that Mark [Zuckerberg, Facebook founder,] hired Sheryl Sandberg. She has political aspirations as does the head of PR she hired, Elliot Schrage. It's pitiful really: I'm shocked. It used to be full of young, idealistic cool people.

What's so shocking? Given Sandberg's penchant for sharp-elbows politics, honed in the Clinton White House, hiring a conservative lawyer with a close ties to the outgoing Republican administration constitutes a wise ideological hedge, lest Facebook be perceived as too Democratic-leaning. We think our tipster's friend nailed it: It's pitiful that he's shocked.

• Served as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
• Worked as the top lawyer for AOL Time Warner in Europe.
• Joined Gonzales at the Department of Justice White House as a deputy assistant and deputy staff secretary in 2003, earning a promotion to chief of staff that stuck when he and Gonzales moved to the Department of Justice in 2005. "[Gonzales's] leadership style is to listen and engage," Ullyot told the Washington Post of Gonzales. "Our job on the staff is to make sure that he's hearing from all the people that he needs to be hearing from."
• Along with Raul Yanes, coordinated the White House's response to the investigation into the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity. The case ended with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief-of-staff Scotter Libby's conviction.
• As assistant to Gonzales when he was the White House counsel, helped defend — or at least did not object to — policies established by the infamous "torture memo," which argued for ways the Bush administration could forgo the Geneva Conventions in order to prosecute the War on Terror. "The tragedy of the torture memo is that it didn't get caught at a much lower level much more quickly," one former Justice Department official under President Bill Clinton told Law.com. "Had that memo received a broader look, there is no question that people would have said this is just wrong, as the administration later admitted it was."
• Earned Alberto Gonzales's unwavering praise: “I appreciate the steady leadership, counsel, integrity, and tireless commitment that Ted brought to this job and the cause of justice. I thank Ted for his great service to the President and the Nation in these challenging times. I wish him all the best as he moves on to this next phase of his career, and I look forward to our continued friendship."

Correction: Part of this post originally suggested Ullyot began working at the DoJ in 2003. He began working with Gonzales at the White House and they both moved to the DoJ in 2005.