I am at a point of disenchantment with Facebook, that I honestly think that even if you’re doing the best, most meaningful research of your life, you’re still doing it for Facebook. And that’s inherently invalidating whatever you’re doing.
Debate about Facebook being good or bad aside, a large portion (if not majority) of human civilization's technical progress were made due to less than idealistic motivations. In fact, I'd categorize a large portion of engineering and scientific achievement under the label of "less-than-altruistic intention, but positive externality".
On the topic of Facebook, I actually think it's fantastic that the biggest social network is getting so much public scrutiny left and right that everything they do is put under a microscope.
Let's be honest, social networks will not go away, if Facebook disappears tomorrow another one will take its place before the end of the year, and they will just be as "evil" when it comes to privacy invasion and data gathering (why else would you start a social network in the first place?). However they are likely to be less incompetent than Facebook at PR and likely to have a more charismatic and likable CEO than Zuck, and before you know they are doing the exact same shady things without the public freaking out all the time.
This certainly wasn't true of MySpace.
Also I just disagree with this sentiment in general.