Zuckerberg: Privacy anxiety is fleeting

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20066789-93.html

by jamesbritt • 15 years ago

22 33 15 years ago

news.cnet.com

wccrawford2• 15 years ago

I came set to fight, but... He's right. People really do just give up their privacy that easily. Take it away a bit at a time and eventually they get used to it. Facebook has proven it.

There will always be those who won't stand for it... But there's not enough of them.

My real problem with Facebook and privacy isn't that it allows you to give it up, but that it takes it from you and then let's you opt out of it.

Giving things up should always be opt-in.

revorad• 15 years ago

"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

damoncali2• 15 years ago

I would argue they've received neither.

baddox• 15 years ago

With Facebook, you always maintain the right to privacy. You can only allow a few friends to see your photos, you can restrict your public profile, and you can even refuse to use Facebook.

I've never understood why Facebook issues are labeled "privacy issues." The ability to willfully share something has nothing to do with privacy. There is only a privacy issue if you are unable to keep something private that you would rather be kept private.

damoncali2• 15 years ago

Yes- I am comfortable giving my privacy up. I will never be comfortable having it taken away. Facebook either does not understand this or does not care.

A side thought> what would facebook be like today if they actually respected privacy legitimately?

TomOfTTB• 15 years ago

He could be right. But I think he's cutting the cycle off short. To me the cycle is this...

* People worry about a new feature

* The feature sticks around and people do get more comfortable with it (this is where Zuckerberg ends)

* At some point the initial fears are realized and people become eternally disenchanted with the feature

So for example he mentions the Wall.

* People were nervous about the Facebook wall at first because they thought putting so much information about themselves in one easy to locate place was a bad idea.

* People got more comfortable with it because it was forced on them and nothing bad happened.

* Now what I'm starting to hear is more and more companies are requiring applicants to friend them when they apply for a job. Every person who told me an employer asked for access to their Facebook page has also told me they regretted some of the things on their wall and would be wary of it in the future.

So I see a backlash at the end of the road here. One Zuckerberg (understandably) doesn't want to face.

bluedanieru• 15 years ago

I know it's not exactly helpful to tell those people "don't work for such an employer" but nevertheless: Don't Work For Them.

dnaquin• 15 years ago

also "no" is a valid answer to "employer asked for access to their Facebook page".

i'd do the same thing if an employer asked to search my apartment or read my email.

diego• 15 years ago

It would be nice to know who those employers are so people don't waste time interviewing with them. Asking a prospective employee to be your friend on Facebook is a sneaky way of asking illegal interview questions. Federal and many state laws prohibit asking about race, marital status, place of birth, etc.

DrCatbox• 15 years ago

Also dont forget to ask for a picture of their wife, of the employer/interviewer. They may tell you its not work-related, but a profile of you is related to the position, you tell them you want to know how the wife looks since thats related to who and what type of interviewer/employer you are getting. Before they kick you out, ask if his daughters have good teeth and/or boobs.

samtp• 15 years ago

Such a luxury is not available to most people who are desperately trying to pay the bills without being buried under a mountain of debt

16s• 15 years ago

So do applicants who don't have facebook accounts have to create one to apply? That would be a deal breaker for me. I don't have an account and don't want one.

jbondeson2• 15 years ago

This attitude is exactly why I will never have a facebook account. He sees the protests as a problem, not the degradation of privacy.

Yes, people adapt when they feel they have no choice, but that doesn't make it right.

jennyma• 15 years ago

altly.com for the win!

wccrawford2• 15 years ago

It's a little early to declare them a winner when they haven't yet proven they understand the privacy problem. They haven't even launched and tried to show that they understand.

jbondeson2• 15 years ago

This is going to sound cynical, but I will not trust a company that has the ability to lock me in with my online identity. Just because "current" management respects privacy doesn't mean future management won't sell me up the river.

The setup would have to remove all power a company has over my data, and I haven't seen a system proposed that would do that other than Diaspora. However I have zero faith in them being able to actually deliver as they've shown that they just don't understand how to deliver an open source product of this nature..

BornInTheUSSR• 15 years ago

It's this kind of thinking that turned Facebook from a fun way to share with friends to a glorified contact book for me. What is there that I would want to share with my drinking buddies, mom, a person I met on a plane, coworkers and 16-year-old niece simultaneously?

dreamdu5t2• 15 years ago

I think Zuckerberg really misunderstands the importance of privacy to people. Zuckerberg says having more than one identity "is an example of a lack of integrity." This implies that wanting to selectively show only pieces of yourself to certain groups is a "lack of integrity." Yet that assertion is laughably false as we all do this very thing every day. The job interview scenario proves this and it's only one of many scenarios in which you carefully include or omit aspects of your online identity to influence the perception others have about you.

This is just human nature. Call it social politics, call it whatever you want, but human beings are not profile pages and will never be.

Facebook should be working with me to help manage my online identity, instead of acting like my privacy concerns aren't real.

awj• 15 years ago

Yeah, I'm in the midst of discovering the horror of having my parents/extended family on Facebook. I now have to filter all of my dumb comments against "will mom call me to see if I'm ok" and stupid jokes have to be checked for grandma-appropriateness.

No one presents the same face to the entire world. If Facebook really wants to be a bigger part of my online/social experience, they'll acknowledge and start acting on this fact.

Lagged2Death• 15 years ago

>If Facebook really wants to be a bigger part of my online/social experience, they'll acknowledge and start acting on this fact.

Well, maybe. If Facebook gets your parents and grandparents all playing Farmville, but loses (just) you, Facebook comes out ahead.

code_duck• 15 years ago

I've just started using Facebook after ignoring it all this time.

I've noticed exactly that problem. I commented on some stupid photo my friend posted, and then my mom told me later "Aren't you and Phil supposed to be working?". Good natured of course but it made me realize that actually, Facebook is a really awful place to interact with my friends.

spdy• 15 years ago

And this will one day be the downfall of facebook. If they dont adept... I can understand Zuckerbergs idea of pushing our comfort zone in terms of privacy. He wants to drop his "vision" upon us and on the other hand he has to make money... and thats one way to do it.

But there is a lot of stuff i dont want to share with certain people. (Work,Family,Drinking Buddys etc.) Someone will come around and take a piece of his pie i`m sure about this. The social space is moving to fast and there a needs he does not want to address.

rudiger• 15 years ago

True, but we haven't yet witnessed the consequences of giving up so much of our private information to Facebook (including but not limited to our Web browsing patterns, unique identity, and social graph).

When access to our private information becomes systematically abused for power and profit, then people will be more than anxious about what they've given up.

thomasgerbe• 15 years ago

I 'deal' with it but progressively develop less brand trust and dedication to Facebook.

Facebook Like tracking my movements forced me to install Disconnect in Chrome.

quattrofan• 15 years ago

am I the only one who finds it ridiculous that a guy who has never had a real job, who drops out of college, has no family of his own presumes to understand the importance of privacy?

knowtheory• 15 years ago

You have to wonder whether a guy who says this sort of shit has ever read or watched any dystopian fiction.

1984, Brave New World, THX-1138, Fahrenheit 451, Brazil, all of these are premised on societies where the majority of people are getting by, and are only passively inconvenienced. The problem is that the minority of people who object or deviate from society are crushed by the mechanism of the state (whatever that happens to be).

Privacy anxiety is an ephemeral screen on deeper fundamental issues about fairness and justice in society. Zuckerberg may be right that incorporating further privacy eroding features into society will be easy, but that doesn't make it right.

Regardless of what you think of Google, i at least give them credit that they recognize that the tech they build has scary implications, and that there are lines that they are not supposed to cross (at least, Eric Schmitt has said this a number of times). Zuckerberg does not seem to have any such compunction.

joebadmo• 15 years ago

Relates to an earlier discussion on the role of liberal arts, I think: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2580176

And, now that I think about, as Z is a college drop-out, maybe the role of higher education in general.

The ideas presented in all of the works you cite are ones someone focused on an engineering degree or a tech business to the exclusion of all else might have been exposed to in a broad education. And not just that, but the kind of training that teaches you to think more broadly, in terms other than the metrics that Z seems to restrict himself to.

ck2• 15 years ago

Facebook profits from your lack of privacy.

That's why he's an advocate of you giving it up.

It's really as simple as that.

bxr• 15 years ago

I came here to post the same thing. Zuckerberg is only saying this because his buisness depends on it. Anyone who can get people to listen to them can report on people's opinions as a way to influence other peoples opinions. Considering the way the way the media echo chamber hangs on his every word, hes trying to create a self fulfilling prophecy.

People anxieties aren't fleeting after every update, what is fleeting are peoples assumptions that they can be open on facebook. These days, almost every time I take out my camera someone will inevitably asks me not to put the photos on facebook (not that I would anyway). Some friends have quit drinking because they know that if a picture of them drinking in their free time, which they are allowed to do could still ruin their career.

Facebook isn't making people more candid, its making us self-censor. That self censoring is moving from facebook back to the real world. Its very troubling.

Ryanmf• 15 years ago

Zuckerberg doesn't misunderstand privacy, he misunderstands people.

<long_story... It was the summer of 2004 and I was anxiously awaiting my freshman year of college. Facebook had just been opened to schools beyond the Ivy League, and I distinctly remember being jealous of friends who were headed to USC in the fall, as they received .edu email addresses before many of the rest of us, and were consequently able to register "thefacebook" accounts first. I attended a smaller private university in Southern California, and Facebook went live on our campus roughly six weeks into that first semester.

It felt as if everyone—geeks, football players, rich white girls, international transfer students; seriously, everybody—holed up in their dorm rooms for the next week to play with their new vanity toy. And this wasn't the Facebook you all obsess over now: no apps, no statuses, no pictures, no official pages, no high/junior/elementary schoolers, few adults, really a different thing entirely. But it was enthralling.

I've seen every every major change in Facebook's offering since then, and Mark's right; Every time they've added, removed, or otherwise tweaked a feature, people have become "outraged," formed groups often numbering in the hundreds of thousands to express said outrage, then promptly gone back to not giving a shit and commenting on each other's pictures.

As a marketing/decision science wonk, I can relate to the expectation that people don't actually know what they want, and if asked explicitly to describe what they want, they're almost universally wrong. I get it. I also understand moving forward with features like personal photo uploads paired with user-generated metadata despite pushback from users. It was a year before the iPhone and two years before Android, how could they possibly be expected to understand...yet.

Nevertheless, I think this experience may have warped Mark's approach to his product and the feedback of his users. After a dozen instances of the feigned outrage/complacency/acceptance cycle, why wouldn't Mark (or any other Facebook employee) meet any criticism with "Don't worry, guys. You'll get it eventually." The user base keeps growing, most press coverage is glowing, and investment is flowing. What's the problem?

The problem is that as increasing numbers of people and businesses sink increasing amounts of time and money into this thing ("this thing" being Facebook specifically but also Internet identity/socialization/lifestyle in general), each feature, each policy decision has increasingly significant consequences in the real lives of real people. The problem is that "Should 16-year-olds be able to join our nascent social network?" is a fundamentally different problem than "As we continue to insist that we are your de facto identity on the Internet, do we have a responsibility to provide robust and usable tools to give our users some hope of controlling that identity?" Yet the response from Facebook hasn't changed, and it unfortunately amounts to "Cool it everybody, we've got this covered. You'll get it eventually."

On the topic of privacy on the web, Eric Schmidt famously claimed: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Pardon the expression, but fuck you, Eric. You were born in 1955. You do not and cannot understand what the experience of living a life on the Internet entails. If there were pictures of you from every party you attended in high school and college, presented such that your dopiest, most uncouth acquaintance had carte blanche to append whichever moronic comment first came to mind to the permanent record, and the company maintaining the system repeatedly defaulted your privacy settings to "make sure everyone on earth sees this shit," there is no question in my mind you'd be singing a different tune.

Mark thinks his users' immature preoccupation with privacy is fleeting. If that is truly the case, it's one more reason I think Facebook is fleeting. There seems to be this bizarre assumption that Facebook, as the social network which has to date been the most successful in attracting "normal" and old people, will remain the 800 lb. gorilla til kingdom come. Sorry to disappoint, old folks, but you'll all be dead soon and I don't much care where you post your status updates until then. Insofar as my generation is concerned, I've been a geek among normies my entire life. I went to private, Catholic, rich kid schools for nearly two decades, where I played sports, hung out with jocks I sometimes tolerated and rarely trusted, spent my weekends acting hopelessly awkward around the ladies from our all-girls Catholic "sister" schools (yes, this part of my personality fortunately improved in college), and went home at night to listen to Devo and Invisibl Skratch Piklz records, try to teach myself object-oriented programming, and talk to my Internet friends.

I've observed hordes of people who would insist vehemently that they're "not a 'tech person'" adopt and bail on AIM, adopt and bail on MySpace, and now they've all adopted Facebook. Perhaps Mark thinks there's something special about his creation which has drawn the attention of people who would otherwise be completely disinterested. That his product is so compelling/entrenched that it almost doesn't matter which decisions he/his company makes or who bitches about it, they'll come around eventually. I'd argue that there are more dyed-in-the-wool Internet citizens born every day, and with a much more sophisticated, internalized awareness of "how2internet" the only inherently compelling quality of Facebook is that the people they know and care about are already there. Facebook is far from a perfect product, and any competitor with a marginally better feature set, or shinier chrome, or just some dumb luck could signal the six-months-to-ghost-town countdown for Facebook like MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal and (fill in the blank) before it.

Given that assessments of Facebook's privacy controls and policy have grown more frequent and more scathing, one needn't look far to find opportunities to act as the disruptor in the continued evolution of our identities online.

Oh, and Mark, sweetie: if privacy concerns are soooo 2002, why's your profile on lockdown, bro? You got something to hide? Your unwillingness to chow down on your own dog food doesn't exactly instill confidence in the integrity of your position. Perhaps your investors, advisors, or ad-buyers have their own incentives to chip away at the privacy of your users. Or maybe you just need to kill privacy yourself before you'll be willing to take a seat at the table.

(edit: Changed double hyphens to emdashes. Oh, iPad.)

cmars• 15 years ago

Privacy is not fleeting. I put harmless public information in FB, even though its private. If I have to fill a field I don't want to, I enter fake data. Like my birthday? 1/1/1970. Fake some of your profile info, joke schools and jobs. I don't rely on fb knowing these things, so why not take a piss in the data pool?

Zuckerberg: Privacy anxiety is fleeting

Related Stories