In 2010: Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy Is Over
Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy Is Over
By MARSHALL KIRKPATRICK of ReadWriteWeb
Published: January 10, 2010
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience
yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information
would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company
changed dramatically in December.
In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch
founder Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook's
privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world's
largest social network - and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy
deserve close scrutiny.
Zuckerberg offered roughly 8 sentences in response to
Arrington's question about where privacy was going on Facebook and around the
web. I'll post those sentences on their own first, then follow up with the
questions they raise in my mind. You can also watch the video below, the
privacy part we transcribe is from 3:00 to 4:00.
Zuckerberg:
"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the
question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on
the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'
"And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has
taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people
sharing all this information. 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 has evolved over time.
"We view it as our role in the system to constantly
be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current
social norms are.
"A lot of companies would be trapped by the
conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change -
doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a
lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to
always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the
company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just
went for it."
That's Not a Believable Explanation
This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg
pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information
would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to
the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined
over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago,
is "the vector around which Facebook operates."
I don't buy Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is now
only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself
is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being
arrogant and condescending.
Perhaps the new privacy controls will prove sufficient.
Perhaps Facebook's pushing our culture away from privacy will end up being a
good thing. The way the company is going about it makes me very uncomfortable,
though, and some of the changes are clearly bad. It is clearly bad to no longer
allow people to keep the pages they subscribe to private on Facebook.
This major reversal, backed-up by superficial
explanations, makes me wonder if Facebook's changing philosophies about privacy
are just convenient stories to tell while the company shifts its strategy to
exert control over the future of the web.
Facebook's Different Stories
First the company kept user data siloed inside its site
alone, saying that a high degree of user privacy would make users comfortable
enough to share more information with a smaller number of trusted people.
Now that it has 350 million people signed up and
connected to their friends and family in a way they never have been before -
now Facebook decides that the initial, privacy-centric, contract with users is
out of date. That users actually want to share openly, with the world at large,
and incidentally (as Facebook's Director of Public Policy Barry Schnitt told me
in December) that it's time for increased pageviews and advertising revenue,
too.
The Flimsy Evidence
What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more
public and less private? Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging "and all
these different services that have people sharing all this information."
That last part must mean Twitter, right? But blogging is tiny compared to
Facebook! It's made a big impact on the world, but only because it perhaps
doubled or tripled the small percentage of people online who publish long-form
text content. Not very many people write blogs, almost everyone is on Facebook.
Facebook's Barry Schnitt told us last month that he too
believes the world is becoming more open and his evidence is Twitter, MySpace,
comments posted to newspaper websites and the rise of Reality TV.
But Facebook is bigger and is growing much faster than
all of those other things. Do they really expect us to believe that the
popularity of reality TV is evidence that users want their Facebook friends
lists and fan pages made permanently public? Why cite those kinds phenomena as
evidence that the red hot social network needs to change its ways?
The company's justifications of the claim that they are
reflecting broader social trends just aren't credible. A much more believable
explanation is that Facebook wants user information to be made public and so
they "just went for it," to use Zuckerberg's words from yesterday.
(Why didn't Arrington press Zuckerberg on stage about
this? The rise of blogging is evidence that Facebook needs to change its
fundamental stance on privacy?)
This is Very Important
Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutia of
their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos
and videos - if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real
impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very
infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication
between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of
the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples' lives
together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their
information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says
that's old news, that people are changing. I don't believe it.
I think Facebook is just saying that because that's what
it wants to be true.
Whether less privacy is good or bad is another matter,
the change of the contract with users based on feigned concern for users'
desires is offensive and makes any further moves by Facebook suspect.
Copyright 2010 ReadWriteWeb. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Post a Comment