Facebook's Zuckerberg Says Customs about Privacy are Evolving

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_says_the_age_of_privacy_is_ov.php

by niyazpk • 17 years ago

44 57 17 years ago

patio112• 17 years ago

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.

psranga3• 17 years ago

Interesting point.

And conversely maybe they emphasized privacy earlier only to discourage public indexing so that they could be the toll-keepers and charge a premium for their data.

potatolicious• 17 years ago

Facebook has never emphasized privacy - they've done some very lightweight things to address widespread concerns, but that's about it. In fact, the most recent privacy update contained sneaky tricks that made un-savvy users open more stuff to public view.

IMHO Facebook is well aware that their social network is consisted in large part of stalking, and that the relevance and value proposition to its users relies upon the ability to view as much of other users' data as possible. A lot of people, if they were given the easy option, would choose to lock their Facebook accounts down like Fort Knox - which would severely impact the usefulness of Facebook for others. It's in Facebook's best interest to have you share as much of your stuff with as many people as possible.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

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.

patio112• 17 years ago

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.

petewarden• 17 years ago

Even more important, they want to make sure the commercial pages on Facebook get traffic. The more public profiles there are with "I'm a fan of X" links on them, the more Google juice and traffic those pages get, and the more important they become to brands.

I'm happy to exploit their openness with my http://fanpageanalytics.com site, but I do think most people are unaware of how much is visible to web crawlers.

poutine• 17 years ago

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

bitdiddle2• 17 years ago

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

haupt2• 17 years ago

Nope. Delete it here: https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_a...

Uchikoma• 17 years ago

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

thinkbohemian• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

Even then, those privacy controls are flawed. http://gawker.com/5428155/the-facebook-privacy-settings-youv... has a good summary.

jganetsk• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

sown• 17 years ago

I hate people.

chrischen2• 17 years ago

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.

axod2• 17 years ago

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.

chrischen2• 17 years ago

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)

Pahalial• 17 years ago

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.

makecheck• 17 years ago

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.

rythie2• 17 years ago

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.

stan_rogers• 17 years ago

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

haupt2• 17 years ago

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

cookiecaper2• 17 years ago

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.

psranga3• 17 years ago

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.

cookiecaper2• 17 years ago

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).

s3graham• 17 years ago

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

Wishfully.

fauigerzigerk2• 17 years ago

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.

jacquesm5• 17 years ago

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

http://www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg

bootload• 17 years ago

"... at least he's eating his own dogfood ..."

This is pretty recent, I mean post 2009DEC14 because I checked. Prior to that the site was by friending only. But do you really think this is his private account where his friends hang out for all to see? ~ http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=Mark+Zuckerberg&init=q...

rythie2• 17 years ago

He is updating twice a month! most people on Twitter update a lot more than that - I don't think he is keeping up with the trend.

kelnos2• 17 years ago

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.

adriand• 17 years ago

I'm not so sure that "users are not their customers".

I was thinking about this yesterday when I talked to my father-in-law (probably the only person I know without Internet or a computer) about a rapidly growing Facebook group opposed to the suspension of parliament in Canada. He asked me to add him to the list, but I told him he'd have to be on Facebook for that to happen. He replied, "oh, so only customers of Facebook can join?"

I thought his use of the word "customers" was odd, because I was thinking that "users" would be more appropriate.

But then I got to thinking. Yes, advertisers are clearly customers of Facebook: they pay money in return for a service. But these advertisers wouldn't pay a dime were it not for Facebook's users, who represent to advertisers either existing or potential customers. In that sense, users are very clearly customers, though not necessarily customers of Facebook.

However, time is money, and users of Facebook are spending a lot of it on Facebook ("spending time" on Facebook: the connection between time and money is clear). Furthermore, the time they spend on Facebook is crucial to Facebook's ability to attract and retain advertisers.

This makes them very much like customers, I think: they are purchasing a service from Facebook with something valuable (their time), and if they did not do so, the company would fail.

fauigerzigerk2• 17 years ago

I don't necessarily disagree with everything you said. What you describe is part of that complex indirection I mentioned. But at the end of the day it's not definitions of "customer" that matter so much as what kinds of incentives this triangle structure comprising service provider, user and advertiser actually provides to each party. (As far as definitions go you could just as well say that users are merchandise in this case)

There is clearly a vested interest on the part of service providers to make users hand over control of as much data as possible, no matter if it's good or bad for them. How convenient that all of a sudden society has changed its attitude towards privacy, and users now _want_ service providers to help them share share share everything with everyone else.

I wonder where Mr. Zuckerberg's sociological studies may lead us next. Maybe society changes again and users want Facebook to send product recommendations in their name? It's such a hassle to maintain all those friendships manually. Clearly, we need help in feeding our friends with fresh, valuable information every day! How about an automated Friendfeed? ;-)

gnaritas2• 17 years ago

Users aren't the customers, they're the bait; they're what's used to hook paying customers, the advertisers. The only respect Facebook has for their bait is only as much is necessary to keep them on the hook; they aren't worthy of trust and they most certainly tolerate tons of scams on their users as long as they're getting their proper revenue from it.

paul• 17 years ago

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)

TheKid• 17 years ago

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.

jacopogio2• 17 years ago

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

jacquesm5• 17 years ago

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

jacopogio2• 17 years ago

I like that! What more ?

3)...

wjdix• 17 years ago

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.

anonjon• 17 years ago

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.

dtf2• 17 years ago

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.

psranga3• 17 years ago

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.

dtf2• 17 years ago

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.

theashworld• 17 years ago

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.

malloreon• 17 years ago

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."

Facebook's Zuckerberg Says Customs about Privacy are Evolving

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