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Facebook's Zuckerberg Says Forget Privacy
judgecorp writes "Privacy is no longer a social norm, according to the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Speaking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco, the entrepreneur said that expectations had changed, and people now default to sharing online, not privacy. It's all right for him, but does he mean it's ok for bodies like the UK government to monitor all citizens' Internet use?"
What he's saying is it is his customers (advertisers not users) want less privacy, so they can target ads more profitably.
It does seem like people are willing to sacrifice much more privacy for the sake of convincing everyone how cool they are. It's a long way from those scary bar-codes everyone was worried about 30 years ago.
I can say [REDACTED] anytime I want!
"Privacy is no longer a social norm ...". I suppose that's correct. Stupidity and ignorance have replaced it, among other things. But that's ok with me as long as I continue to have a choice. Besides, those new "norms" can make for good entertainment.
Do your own thing. And overdo it!
Whatever you have ever said or done will continue to be used against you for the rest of your life. That is the world this kind of thinking creates. It creates fear to think or act. Privacy is ultimately about liberty.
Privacy is dead, get over it
If privacy is such an outdated concept, Mr. Zuckerberg, why can't I see your friends list, your photos, or just about anything else on your Facebook page? Set everything to public on your own page, show everyone how silly privacy concerns are.
People still expect privacy, even Facebook/MySpace/whatever users. They just suffer from two things, an assumption that the Social Media outlets act in a responsible way keeping the information they submit confidential and a general misunderstanding that putting information on the Internet without any controls now makes that private information very public.
People friend their friends on Facebook and blab about whatever as they would if they were talking to this person directly in a private context. They don't see that they have submitted the information where it is viewable and searchable by everyone and is being recorded and analyzed by the company for later sale as statistics. This is an indication of technology moving faster then the average person keeps up with, not that everyone is suddenly ok with being monitored.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
All this CEO is admitting is that he's unable to come up with a way to monetize his services without compromising people's privacy. The whole appeal of facebook, originally, was that it preserved privacy and kept the spammers to a minimum, when compared with MySpace. Now that Facebook is leaving one of its basic reasons for existing in the dust, someone else will come along and will replace it, and there'll be a mass migration to the latest thing. Just takes the next smart guy to create it. Perhaps it'll be based upon personal DRM. (Har har!) --Ray
http://www.beanleafpress.com
People do have an expectation of privacy that is at odds with what has been happening on the Internet. *Specifically* social networking sites like Facebook where there are real names attached to accounts and visible out in the open.
I feel privileged to live in Canada where we've enshrined some of our expected privacy into law to fight assholes like this. I hope the United States follows suit someday.
YOU* Defaulted US to share, not that we CHOSE to. I'm sure had you prompted each individual how private they want their settings when they first signed up, a lot of people would have chosen Friends, or friends of friends, or at least to a specific network (Like the local university).
In fact, You** semi tried doing so not too long ago, and as I recall, A LOT of people then locked their photos and status updates to friends only. I know I did, and about 99% of my friends list did, and when I facebook search someone I met at a party, I have to grab a friend invite before I see anything besides their name and profile pic.
You can't just set it up so that sharing is the norm, and when people use your product, then claim that its what is expected.
*If not You Mark, then whoever is running Facebook Right now.
**Subjective as above
Facebook.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Facebook is designed from the ground up to be nonprivate. Since it doesn't allow you to distinguish between "work friends" and "party friends" and "closet friends", anyone with a brain will only post lowest-common-denominator acceptable comments to FB. If everyone is treating Facebook that way, there's no benefit to be gained by adding privacy to interactions that are already self-sanitized.
But there are *plenty* of social interactions that *do* require an expectation of privacy, ranging from private sexual lives to the mere fact that I don't want my work colleagues to know about my Warcraft friends, or vice versa. But Zuckerberg doesn't see these sides of people, because they're not on Facebook.
Jumping from "Facebook interactions don't need privacy" to "our society doesn't need privacy" is a fallacy of composition.
But false to fact.
The young generally have little experience with privacy and why it's important. Until they get bit by the consequences of excessive disclosure. Then they learn to value it.
(It's not just Gen-Y-ers. It happened to me, and I'm a boomer - which means I predate the Internet by a bunch. B-b)
Zuckerberg's business consists of making a lot of money by catering to those who have yet to learn the lesson. And management positions attract those for whom telling the truth when a lie is more convenient is also not a social norm. Of COURSE he'll make such claims. And they're sheer self-serving puffery.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Keep fucking with my privacy settings. Keep on assuming that I want to share everything with every jerkoff on Facebook. I'll just keep locking my shit down. And if you want to make that impossible, know that I lived happily without Facebook once. I can easily remember how to do so again. Remember your place while you still have one.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
No, but policy will expand to fit the tolerances of social norm, and he's right: Social norms have changed to have little expectations of privacy. People just don't see the importance in it anymore, which is, in and of itself, terrifying. I am somewhat troubled when I think of what the near future holds.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Because I use my Facebook account to share events in my life, does not mean I am not concealing events in my life.
I have an expectation of privacy. Especially in real life. I do not have the same expectations of privacy in public, or with information I post via internet servers which I do not own or control. There seems to be a lot of attempts to indoctrinate the youth with the concept that their lives are subject to peer review at all times. I disagree with these motives and find them totalitarian in nature.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
Zuckerberg is trying to cover his ass. His site can't or won't provide proper access controls. His customers, the advertisers, don't want you to have privacy from them. So Mr. Zuckerberg, calling himself a 'prophet,' no less, tells you that you don't want privacy. But of course, Mr. Zuckerberg still wants his own privacy, and this 'no more privacy' world does not include corporations or governments, only individuals. Is there some easy way to find out who is advertising on facebook? No, and you can't find out what deals have been made regarding your information. So, privacy still exists, for those who can afford it. But not for us. Thank you Prophet Zuckerberg.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
Absolutely not true, he set up his site to default to no privacy, that is a COMPLETELY different matter, there are numerous huge groups and countless chain messages in protest of the badly chosen default privacy settings on facebook.
And this from the man who openly admitted to pushing malware in some interview not so long ago to get his company off the ground.
we have finally defeated privacy!
-Better Off Ted
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Thats all well and good Mark, but see there is this little problem, which is that 99% of all governments in the world (and probably 90% of all users on the internet) cant distinguish Internet from IRL and in fact are actively pushing them together in ways which should be quite alarming to long time net users. Lack of privacy would be fine if the government couldnt punish you for it, but they can. Every single legal system extant today has not sufficiently dealt with the realities of cheap and fast information, they were all constructed over hundreds (some times thousands for those of you living in countries following in the tradition of Roman law and Cannon law) of years where the basic assumption was the certain physical facts about the universe protected individuals from each other and from their government. That is no longer the case, and until it is we should all be very very cautious.
http://www.facebook.com/zuck
cat
Here's the problem - they are attempting to change society's "reasonable expectation of privacy." Many laws are based on this social expectation. For example, the police have the ability to execute warrantless searches if they see something "in plain sight." That "plain sight" element is coupled to your expectation of privacy - you put said item into plain sight, thus you have no expectation of privacy regarding it. If you go to a public park, your expectation of privacy is reduced because of the venue. Facebook is attempting to alter the rules regarding what "normal" expectations are. They will do this without your consent, and rip your privacy out from under you.
... and sometimes fight for.
Like your freedom, privacy is something you have to earn
...is 25 years old. One of the sentences in TFA begins "When I was in my dorm room at Harvard."
So, a rich, successful, right-place-at-place-at-the-right-time twentysomething makes a self-serving comment born out of the hubris and inexperience of youth. This is like Paris Hilton saying "It doesn't matter what you do, as long as its *hot*" and it is only newsworthy because Paris Hilton isn't in a position to take a great deal of the intellectual capital I've invested in Facebook and simply passing it to whomever suits her fancy. Perhaps some of Zuckerberg's older business partners could recommend that he shut up.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. -Richard Feynman
The problem is that they pretend to be securing you, when the reality is that it's a bathroom door level of security. A reasonably nerdy middle school kid can burn through facebook security.
facebook didnt build a good security foundation, now they're paying for it.
Storm
Do people have more opportunities than their parents did? I don't think so. They have more gadgets. Do more gadgets make people happier? I don't think so. Look at rates of depression, people nowadays are FAR more likely to suffer from depression than their parents or grandparents. Young people are the most likely to suffer from our current economic problems, unemployment is rampant amongst the under 25 crowd. People have less opportunity, less privacy, less control over their lives, fewer real life friends and more online acquaintances. So how, exactly, is life better?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
If this twat thinks that privacy is no longer a social norm, where's the video's of him masturbating to pictures of George Orwell? The blog describing his plushy fantasies. The tweets giving everyone blow-by-blow updates to the size of his bank balance.
The reality is that even the unthinking morons that post pics/vids/words of themselves doing cringeworthy, career-limiting, dumb shit, STILL make a choice about what to post. There's still plenty of stuff that they don't want ANYONE knowing. The line may have moved over the last 20 years, but it hasn't disappeared.
Facebook will undoubtedly point to some weasel words in their TOS to claim that they still own my personal data
Luckily they allow me to change my personal data.
Cool, they'll own a completely fabricated and falsified set of my personal data.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
My account sits active with 2 photos, no applications, and the minimum personal information required.
I use it to find family members and friends I need to get in contact with and also for event invitations which I think is its strongest value.
Now why does this make me special? It doesn't, its the fact that the majority of my friends who used to have bucket loads of information, photos, and applications have since gone to a skeleton account like me. This makes us a loss, we bring no value to the site. The more and more people who do this, the lower the value of Facebook.
That depends entirely on whether or not Facebook keeps a cache of your old data. Something tells me if you change your name from Joe Miller to Fred Flintstone, and then cancel your account 10 minutes later, that won't be enough to purge your real name from Facebook's databases. Also, what do you do about photos? It's a near certainty that when you delete a photo from your FB account, that photo still resides somewhere on their server, most likely in multiple locations.
More the point:
Just because people do it with his product and he wants them to do it more so he makes more money selling data to various interested parties (governments, marketing firms, think tanks, NGOs, lobby groups, industry insiders etc) doesn't make it right.
His bias towards having people use Facebook more is so obvious I don't know why he bothered. It'd be like Darl McBride saying "forget free software because fully commodified IP is the new norm" or something else equally transparent.
Fuck Zuckerberg and fuck his agenda to destroy the personal space.
I hate printers.
If one chooses to put any particular detail on Facebook, then one is explicitly saying I am sharing this with the "friends" I have selected on Facebook; in that regard, because those other people are party to the information, they may elect to share it further, or not -- because you gave the information to them openly, without any particular agreement, that information now belongs to the other party as much as it does to you.
Depending on the user agreement one accepts when one joins Facebook, you may have also stipulated that Facebook itself is party to your information, and in that case, again, Facebook can share it, or not, according to the terms of the agreement you accepted in order to enjoy whatever it is Facebook offers.
However, assuming you have even one friend on Facebook, by the very act of posting something there, you're taking the risk that the other person or people in your friends list may elect to further share that information. This is a choice you made. Your information may now travel to places you didn't plan on because you chose to share it. You still had a choice, and if "sharing" is something that you want to do, then you must accept the potential that the other parties may consider your information not part of the class of things they will won't share. This arises naturally because information that is important to you may be (probably is) of little consequence to others. And of course this applies to Facebook as per the user agreement you agreed to.
In a nutshell, privacy arises as a consequence of socially understood boundaries relating to access; the understanding can arise formally, as an agreement (like Facebook) or it can be culturally infused, like you don't read someone else's diary. It can be legally backed up, such as opening a letter addressed to someone else. It can often be hardened: encryption, bars, etc. In all cases, boundaries that are in the most basic sense (prior to being hardened) easy to cross, are laid out, and you are expected not to cross them.
If you want to know more (or argue) about how privacy actually works, I've written at length about it here.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Most of us aren't interesting enough to have friends post embarrassing pictures of us on the Internet. Besides that would require us to interact with other people, possibly including girls.
I'm going to disagree somewhat. I'm playing Bioshock right now, and not only am I getting my jollies from one hell of a shooter, but I'm also exposed to a very well written story which includes a good rebuttal to the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. I'm not going to get that from being in the wilderness for two weeks. The game makes me THINK, and ponder, and I tend to enjoy that.
I see your point about breaking away from technology and all, but part of what makes us truly human is the ability to see, analyze, review, and enjoy our creations, and see the universe we built for ourselves, with all its inherent complexities. While breaking away to the wilderness and cutting our technological ties is good for silencing the ego and reconnecting with our selves, that has to be balanced with being engaged with the world as it is, because otherwise you're missing out on half of existence.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.