It’s no secret that Facebook regularly has its share of privacy issues, many of which are their own doing. Now Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has given a talk in which he says, in effect, “Our users don’t want privacy.”
While many, if not most, companies would consider the privacy of their users paramount, and not something to be routinely mutated, Zuckerberg and his Facebook clearly see it differently.
In fact, Zuckerberg, referring Facebook’s most recent ‘improvement’ of Facebook privacy, said last week during an interview at the Crunchies Awards, that “A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacy of the systems that they’ve built. Doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the type of thing that a lot of companies would do.”
Well yes, that’s true – but perhaps that’s because a lot of companies have a greater sense of loyalty to their users’ privacy.
Zuckerberg went on to share more of Facebook’s views on user privacy, saying that “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that’s evolved over time.”
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Is that really where user expectations and societal norms have evolved? Or is that where social networking sites have pushed users – gradually getting them used to a complete invasion of their privacy?
Why does the old saw about putting the frog in the pot of cold water, and then bringing the water slowly to boiling come to mind?
Zuckerberg then went on to explain that “But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and think, what would we do if we were starting the company now, and starting the site now, and we decided that these would be the social norms now, and we just went for it.”
Translation: “We realize now that we needed to make our user information much more available to third-party applications, and to people searching the web – if we had it to do all over again, we wouldn’t have even bothered with the semblence of user privacy with which we started.
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mr. zuckerberg puts his big dirty finger on the very reason i do not have, or want, a “facebook” account. i do value what little real privacy i still have in this increasingly nosy, inquisitive world.
Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t hesitate to restore his own privacy when he realized it had been compromised by his own company’s asenine policy change. Different expectations for different classes of people?