

Facebook's Zuckerberg Says Customs about Privacy are Evolving - niyazpk
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_says_the_age_of_privacy_is_ov.php

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paul
I think it's worth noting that this title is a fabrication, not an actual
quote.

What he actually said is interesting, but wouldn't get as much traffic or
angry comments:

"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."

(transcript copied from rww, but it looks accurate to me)

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fauigerzigerk
What we should always keep in mind when bosses of ad funded services speak
about what users want is that these users are not their customers.

Users are just an indirect means to make advertisers happy, and that
indirection is a complex thing. If Facebook can make advertisers happy by
hurting users without losing them they will.

Facebook has a history of deception. Nobody should be surprised to hear the
kind of disingenuous nonsense coming from Mr. Zuckerberg.

~~~
jacquesm
I can't stand the guy, but at least he's eating his own dogfood:

<http://www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg>

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kelnos
That's actually his "fan" page. His FB profile page is here:

<http://www.facebook.com/zuck>

... and I'm surprised to see it seems to be mostly open.

~~~
richardw
Is it? I see "Mark only shares some of his Profile information with everyone."
and the rest looks pretty locked down to me. Who are his friends? Where pics?

~~~
kelnos
Ahh, I guess he has his profile set to "friends of friends," so I can see his
profile info since he and I have mutual friends.

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makecheck
Facebook is essentially free (except for advertising). The exposure of
information _is_ the price of admission. If these were physical assets, you
might have to pay someone $3 for a padlock to feel more secure; but has anyone
paid Facebook even $3 to use the site? No? And they feel entitled to gripe
about all the things Facebook isn't doing for them?

We live in an age where information can be sent anywhere, instantly, with high
fidelity. It is impossible to "secure" information if someone sees what you're
doing, you don't notice them, and they decide to take a picture with their
cell phone, send a text message, or otherwise tell the world what you're up
to.

Maybe it's "easier" to blame someone like Facebook, but the reality is that no
one takes personal responsibility. If you can't handle the whole world knowing
what you did, then maybe you shouldn't be doing it; these days, that's about
the best defense you have.

~~~
rythie
People pay what Facebook asks of them, i.e. nothing except ads. It was on
those grounds people accepted as their social network. By contributing my
content to Facebook I help make it a place for my friends to come to often and
for Facebook to sell ads.

If Facebook don't like the price the sell their product for, the like any
company, have the freedom to change the price.

That's why people feel entitled.

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chrischen
The only reason I used facebook was because it was clean and closed. I think
somebody's just jealous of Twitter.

Also notice I said _was_. it's getting progressively less clean and closed.

~~~
axod
I knew there would be someone who makes this funny claim :)

Yep, I'm sure facebook are hugely jealous of twitters revenue :D

Seriously. Wake up.

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chrischen
Right and they want us to open up our information so everyone can be friends
with each other and there will be world peace. (sarcasm)

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patio11
I have seen very little discussion of the business rationale for this, which
is clear: Facebook wants all of its user-generated content to be searchable,
which would VASTLY increase the amount and price of the display advertising
which they sell.

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ErrantX
Can you clarify what you mean by that; does it mean advertisers will be able
to see how big the network is and view some demographics? Or are you saying it
allows advertisers to push the ethical boundaries and try to link impressions
to real people via the searchable data? (or something else?)

As far as I read their terms they cant just give advertisers any details about
you; even if that info is public.

~~~
patio11
I mean that Facebook is essentially a display business and that most display
businesses derive 70%+ of their traffic from Google searches, but Facebook
cannot benefit from this unless they put their information public.

Essentially, if your feed is public, then your name, stream, and life is just
one big content creation stream for Facebook to show display ads against. Just
doing it for _names_ is worth hundreds of millions of dollars -- think of how
many there are, how often they are searched, and how little competition there
is for most of them. Domain authority alone should mean that Facebook
dominates for searches of people who do not maintain their own websites.

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jacquesm
What surprises me is that linked-in actually comes up more than facebook even
today when searching for people.

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axod
How many people search google for people :/

If I'm trying to find old friends etc, I go straight to facebook and search
there.

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gnaritas
Are you kidding? Facebook search sucks, they don't have monitors/alerts, or
any kind of complex searching like Google. Google still owns search and plenty
of us still use Google when looking for people because believe it or not, not
everyone uses Facebook.

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Uchikoma
Not sure if he feels the same concerning his life, what he eats, his house,
his family his movements, his board decisions, his illnesses.

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poutine
I'm starting a new age of privacy by deleting my Facebook account. Bite me
Zuckerberg.

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bitdiddle
how do you delete, is that the same as deactivate?

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haupt
Nope. Delete it here:
[https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_a...](https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account)

~~~
bitdiddle
thanks, done.

EDIT: actually I guess it's deleted in 14 days. KInd of like a divorce,
there's a wait period.

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jganetsk
Everyone's bitching and moaning about a quote of Eric Schmidt's that was taken
out of context... when it was Zuck that we should've worried about.

~~~
waterlesscloud
But this has _always_ been Zuck's position. He hasn't always focused on saying
it in public, but he's always had little patience for people wanting privacy
in social networks.

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TheKid
His statements indicate they are ignoring the fact that the social norms of
bloggers and the social norms of friends connecting on a website and sharing
information are not the same. Assuming that Facebook's users think they are
publishing in public, versus publishing to a specific list of friends that
they control is ludicrous.

The fact that this is being ignored is very disturbing. This move is clearly
being driven by business decisions without the consideration of its users and
their privacy.

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s3graham
HN's s3graham says The Age of Facebook is Over.

Wishfully.

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wjdix
What he's saying is incredibly beneficial to himself. How convenient for him
to say that no one cares about privacy after he took away that option from his
users.

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malloreon
Apropos comment from Reddit:

summary:

"When I was trying to get people to trust me with their personal details, I
completely understood just how much they valued their privacy.

"Now that I know just how much advertisers are prepared to pay for said
personal details, I'm suddenly convinced that no one values privacy anymore."

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theashworld
The problem is that most folks are not made aware of the fact that privacy is
a one-way street. Once open to all, the information is always lurking around
somewhere, basically impossible to delete. I try to explain that to non-techie
folks and they don't believe it.

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dtf
Facebook users are an odd bunch. They'll bitch about privacy, turn their
privacy settings up to max en masse, and form angry Facebook protest groups at
every little change in the company's policy. Then they'll go and sign up to a
bunch of spam applications written by people they don't know and give them
unfettered access to their profil.

I'm with Zuckerberg on this one. I reckon the world could be a better place if
everyone laid their cards on the table. I keep my profile as open as possible,
following the rule that I don't post anything that I wouldn't be happy for
anyone to see.

~~~
psranga
So basically you're using FB to build a public profile (i.e., your "brand")?

IMHO, this is not the use case for most FB users. I use FB to talk semi-
privately with my friends (my expectation is that FB be as private as
unencrypted email, which it now isn't).

I would use LinkedIn+Twitter to build a profile/brand.

~~~
dtf
Brand? That makes it all sound rather soulless :-(

It's just a personal page. I use to keep contact with friends and share photos
and random musings, like twitter with a few extras. Unless you're being ultra-
cynical, I don't think everyone on twitter is trying to build a brand. Some
people just like to talk.

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stan_rogers
Scott McNealy said it in 1999. And his advice applies today as it did then:
get over it.

~~~
haupt
Steve Rambam said it, too, but I still don't believe it.

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cookiecaper
Anyone who expects any kind of privacy after uploading something to a site
like Facebook is totally crazy.

If you are concerned about privacy, run your own servers, use encryption, and
manage things yourself. The moment you transfer control to a third party you
lose any reasonable expectation of privacy.

Facebook is a sharing platform. It's not meant to keep things private or
quiet. Those who upload pictures or info to Facebook, HotOrNot, 4chan, or
anything else and expects them to just fade away or be ignored is highly
misinformed.

The internet is a public place. You only put things on the internet if you
want to share them. If you have something private, you have to make lots and
lots of extra precautions and can't just count on Facebook to keep it locked
up safe for you forever.

Almost by definition security costs convenience and effort. There's no way
around it.

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psranga
I think most reasonable people would question your claim that you lose any
_reasonable_ expectation of privacy just because you shared something with
your friends. I view Facebook as an easier way to communicate with my friends
than by cc'ing them on emails.

Do you think the expectation that email be reasonably private is unreasonable?
What about physical letters? What's the difference between the above and
Facebook?

As the linked article said, Facebook for long has claimed their better
"reasonable" privacy controls as a strength.

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cookiecaper
I guess it depends on how you define "reasonably" private.

E-mail is a little different than something like Facebook, initially, because
Facebook persistently displays your data whereas email is a one-time thing;
you list the people you want to see the email, send it, they receive it, and
it's offline in the meantime, it's not a shared asset. So, in that way, it's
not subject to the same kind of possible privacy alterations that a social
network where your data is always displayed and available is.

That said, e-mail is rather insecure. While it might take more effort than
sending a friend request, intercepting an email is still pretty easy, and
people at Google can access your data. While it's not likely that there are
Google employees going through random email boxes for fun, the contents and
metadata of your emails can be disclosed through subpoena, security breaches,
or other means.

So, while there is some privacy in a normal Gmail account, say, enough to keep
a casual home or business user satisfied, that privacy is still highly
dependent on competence and goodwill at Google.

The bottom line is that if you have something that really needs to be kept
private, you need to at least encrypt your data with something like PGP. Your
data is not private at Google and it is certainly not private on Facebook or
Myspace, whose business depends on increasing pageviews and time spent on site
at minimal cost (i.e., making extant content available to more people).

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jacopogio
we may need a NEW really-Private sort-of-Facebook => anyone? It should be : \-
1) open-source \- 2) ...

~~~
jacquesm
We need a distributed facebook, where users keep control of their data, like a
giant webring (ok, web-graph) system.

~~~
jacopogio
I like that! What more ?

3)...

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anonjon
When I first used facebook I seem to remember that there were no privacy
settings whatsoever, but people who could see you were restricted to your
college.

When Facebook was first opened to people outside of your college, there was a
lot of controversy about it. All of your information was (suddenly) open to
the public. People had stuff up there that they didn't want Joe weirdo on the
internet looking up. I seem to remember Mark saying something to the effect of
(at the time), 'I think this should be an open platform for everyone to see
everyone else's information'.

But then a mass exodus from Facebook started, and people were deleting their
profiles, etc.. (I know I removed a lot from mine). After the uproar, he
finally caved and they added privacy settings.

If anything Zuckerberg has been consistent about what he wants the platform to
be. The real issue is that his 'consistent' view is /not/ what the majority of
Facebook users actually want. They want to connect with people that they
already know on Facebook, and be able to share stuff within a small community.

The truth is that there are a lot of really sketchy people on the internet,
who want to steal your information, stalk you, and such. Putting up the type
of things that you do on facebook, publicly, is simply not a good idea.

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sown
I hate people.

------
Pahalial
CEO makes statement whose widespread acceptance would see his company's
product embraced a hundredfold more while outright dispelling the most common
concerns about it.

News at 11.

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thinkbohemian
I guess with sites like tweet-poop, saying privacy is over is not completely
out of the blue but still...the founding principal that got people hooked to
FB in the first place was they trusted it to keep their information secure.

This statement and the latest corporate actions is a complete slap in the face
to all original users.

~~~
baguasquirrel
I don't think people ever really expected FB to keep their information totally
secure. I still remember the college days when I logged into
school.facebook.com. The implicit understanding back then was that only your
h.s. and college fwenz could see your shit, because the only way to get onto
FB was to use your .edu email addy.

It was a Faustian bargain. In exchange for being able to see when your friends
broke up, they could see your status as well. We were all hooked, because as
it turns out, teenagers and college kiddies like to gossip about each other.
FB made it progressively easier to stalk your friends, and each time people
would complain (I think the news feed was Rubicon), but the more they put on,
the more people would bite.

Fast forward to today, and now your mother, your boss, that goddamn cousin of
yours, they can all see everything about you. Unless you use those privacy
controls. This is a bit different from the carefree gossiping amongst kiddies
thing. It just doesn't really feel like the old days anymore.

~~~
jeffreylo
Even then, those privacy controls are flawed. [http://gawker.com/5428155/the-
facebook-privacy-settings-youv...](http://gawker.com/5428155/the-facebook-
privacy-settings-youve-lost-forever) has a good summary.

