The Age of Privacy is Over, says Zuckerberg.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.
In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook’s privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world’s largest social network – and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.
Who cares if it’s private or not? Anyone who puts private information on a site like that is an idiot.
The Canadian Privacy Commissioner does.
http://priv.gc.ca/media/nr-c/2009/nr-c_090827_e.cfm
hhopper is right! Its a social network so that should give you a hint that its not going to protect you. You would have to be a idiot to think otherwise. Hey, theirs a simple solution if you don’t want to allow your personal information to become public. Don’t sign up for these sites! WOW how simple is that!
I agree with the above. Don’t share information on these websites that you don’t want to become public eventually. That’s just the nature of social networks in any form, and the idea that your information is somehow kept private when sharing it on a network is a total fallacy.
@#1,2 The main problem is that the initial success of the site was exactly due to the extremely tight privacy policy: college kids didn’t want parents or other “cliques” to be able to intrude. Tight privacy was in terms of service. If it was not, Facebook wouldn’t get people signing for it and would be nowhere to find by now. Now, info and spread gathered under guise of tight privacy is suddenly not to be expected… Social networking sites are fickle matter, if Facebook continues with this type of changes, users will go away o a newer better site(s). Internet is anything but stagnant.
I don’t think the headline “The Age of Privacy is Over” is actually what Zuckerberg said. Read the quote and see.
If he did say that, I think he’s arrogant and wrong, but I don’t think he did.
If the privacy goes away, so do I and a lot of the users.
Its not a natter of not knowing it is a ‘Social Site’. Its a matter of not wanting it PUBLIC. There is a difference.
If these people keep saying ‘internet privacy is over’ enough times, people will come to accept it.
Great. Do the same thing for email.
yeah I locked things down as tight as they would let me. Treat it like your gatherings in High School, where things had a habit of ‘getting around’
Zuckerberg == Weasel
I don’t care, so I won’t double check but doesn’t “default position” mean that anyone who cares could still keep his info private?
MOST people don’t care about privacy because they are normal law abiding uninteresting people with nothing to hide. Who here “REALLY” has anything worth keeping secret? Really?
Silly Hoomans.
He has people on line that aren’t even in high school. If he doesn’t watch what he’d doing he is going to be swimming in law suits and maybe charged with some crime.
Here are some examples of how people get stupid on Facebook:
This is funny stuff.
The cost of securing private data is a non-profitable undertaking, the advertisers want customer Facebook profiles for their advertising, the cost of legal defense of an open information policy is acceptable. Lessons to be learned, if your information is online, you have already lost control over how it will be used.
Mr Zuckerberg got very very lucky. And you know, he did something good, so good luck to him.
That said everything he says and does seems to prove he has little in the way on insight.
It also shows that ‘build it and then they’ll come’ sometimes (although very rarely) works.
And if he started all over again, with no privacy settings, he’d be worth about $12 bucks, and not $millions.
I want a system where I can share photos with friends, without worrying that everyone else on earth can see them. I’m still careful: I only post photos that I want other people to see, but I don’t want the whole world watching.
And I thought NBC was the only company willing to screw a winning formula.
The internet is not a private place. Information wants to be free!
What the hell! Why is there the USTREAM logo in the top corner and underneath a little “recorded live” thing.
OF COURSE IT WAS RECORDED LIVE
How the hell else can you record anything!! Set up the cameras several days after the event and use a special temporal-lens to record what happened 3 days earlier.
One thing that the Canadian armed forces does before they send first timers over for a tour in Afghanistan is to take a security course. In one particular example a class of 24 soldiers was introduced to a security instructor. He comes into the classroom and having never met any of them proceeds to tell each of them about themselves. Where they live, their hobbies, they’re kid’s names, schools they attend, ages, wife’s interests, what she does for fun, etc. 23 of the 24 sat there in total shock. Where did he get this info? Facebook. Does the Taliban have access to the internet? Yes. The one guy he didn’t have anything on was because he doesn’t have a Facebook account and isn’t really interested in computers.
So be careful of what you put about yourself on the net.
I for one don’t want all of my facebook friends to be able to see each other.
Not that they are objectionable people or something, it’s only that some can be considered from “mutually incompatible” groups. For example (not the case), some good friends are from Bible study and some others are into heavy rock. Or I am friends with both parts of an ex-couple.
Since friend lists became open to everyone, I have been able to repeatedly browse profiles of people I don’t know from around the world, several “facebook degrees” removed from me. Maybe I can decide what to make public of myself, but I have no right (and neither has facebook) to disseminate my friends’ data, even to each other (and friends of friends, and so on).
So when facebook made the change in privacy policy, I decided to wait until Xmas for them to heed the users’ complains, they didn’t, so on Xmas morning I cancelled my profile, not looking back.