Zuckerberg: People are Happy to Share
Quick question. What is Facebook? 1) a Web community or 2) a Silicon Valley company aspiring to go public?
Last month, Facebook ‘fixed’ its privacy settings; or so we thought. At the time we said: “it’s about time.” Since the announcement, Facebook has been criticized by privacy advocates and it seems the world at large is not taking too kindly to the revision.
At the crux of the matter is Facebook’s new policy of making public, certain information which previously was private. Examples include your profile picture, fan pages and other selected information such as your friend’s list. Notably, after taking some heat, Facebook retreated from making your friend’s list available to the entire Internet– but I’ll bet most people still unknowingly have their friend’s page visible to Web crawlers.
Try this. Google your name and click on your public Facebook page to see what’s visible to the outside world – make sure you’re logged out of Facebook. Interestingly, the setting to disable your friend’s list from public view isn’t so intuitive and most people probably haven’t even thought about it. See how long it takes you to figure out how to hide your friend’s list from an entire Internet searching population. Hmmm. Not so privacy-settings-friendly is it?
Fast forward to this weekend when the Web world was abuzz about an interview that Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg conducted with Michael Arrington at the 2009 Crunchies (the Oscars of the Web). Skip ahead 2:30 in to this video and you’ll see what Zuckerberg said about privacy. Here’s an excerpt:
People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds but more openly and with more people and that social norm is just something that’s evolved over time. And we view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.
Translation: We have Titter envy too, just like Google, Microsoft and Digg. By making more information available and searchable it drives more traffic and more interaction…which means more ads for Facebook. It also means more searchable inventory which means more revenue from Google and Bing. And we’re doing all this under the banner of we’re giving people what they want.
Is this wrong? Not really…But Facebook is being less than open about its true motivation in my view. And if you’re okay sharing more of your personal information with the world then that’s great; I just want you to understand the facts and what’s behind the move—at least from my vantage point. After thinking about this I can’t help but remember Scott McNealy’s quote: “You have zero privacy anyway, get over it.” That was ten years ago.
We need to keep in mind that Facebook’s privacy policies have always been ‘on the edge.’ From the Beacon debacle, to changes in its terms of service about a year ago that essentially said Facebook owns uploaded user content; and now a privacy overhaul for 350 million users that’s really about driving more revenue.
All this makes me think that we as users are not so much comfortable sharing information as we are simply oblivious.
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