Facebook founder says people don’t want total privacy

Facebook has had a lot of flack recently surrounding its policy on privacy. Since December, when Facebook decided to controversially change the privacy settings of its 350 million users, the complaints have kept rolling in.

Well Facebook founder, 25 year old Mark Zuckerberg has hit back. Talking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco, he said that people no longer expect total privacy online.

“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people” said Zuckerberg.

“That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”

In a way I have to agree with him, I mean people are free to use Facebook, or not, and to change their privacy settings, or not. No one is forcing anyone to reveal information. Surely if people were that unhappy they would just stop using the site but they don’t.

Now we all know that revealing personal information on the Internet, whether that is on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking site or blog or website, can carry risks, we only need to check out the news headlines to see that so the responsibility lies with us as users.

Zuckerberg maintains that the rise in the popularity of sites like Facebook is a reflection of how our attitudes towards communicating online have changed in the last few years.

“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,” he said.

Zuckerberg also reckons that companies need to keep up with the times too, and to do so they have to reflect the ‘social norms’.

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built” he said.

“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.”

They sure did!