Celebrities, Google, Web, Social Networking
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Claims Privacy Is Dead
During an interview with the TechCrunch founder on Saturday, Zuckerberg said:
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... 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.
Wow, Zuck. Sure, people have become more comfortable with sharing details about their lives and their relationships online, but they're also accustomed to having control over what information is shared and how. And we're pretty sure no one out there is excited to let Mark Zuckerberg make those decisions for them.
Of course, like it or not, the man is right. The age of privacy seems to be on the way out the cyber-door. This is not because of evolving social norms, though. It's due to standards that have been foisted on a begrudgingly accepting public. While Zuckerberg cites blogging as the source of this public culture, really we can all thank Google. With its top-of-the line Internet search, free Web mail, and navigation services, Google has pretty much coerced us all into accepting that it will be collecting information about our browsing habits in order to provide more targeted advertising. If you ask us, this was the beginning of the end of privacy.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt drew fire when he suggested that anyone concerned about online privacy was trying to hide something. Poor word choice aside, one can't blame him for taking that point of view. Certainly, many users have decided, since Google has already built this database of everything we do, to just share that information with others of their own accord. But the key here is that it's the consumer's decision to do so. And that's why Zuckerberg fails this crucial privacy test.
Watch the interview in its entirety below, or skip straight to the three-minute mark to hear Zuckerberg's remarks on privacy. [From: ReadWriteWeb and Huffington Post]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Big Brother Slowly Cometh? said 2:58PM on 1-17-2010
Terrence, this was a great point you made:
Of course, like it or not, the man is right. The age of privacy seems to be on the way out the cyber-door. This is not because of evolving social norms, though. It's due to standards that have been foisted on a begrudgingly accepting public.
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Big Brother Slowly Cometh? said 3:03PM on 1-17-2010
This part of comment got cut off:
We are only begrudgingly accepting it because its a "prisoners dilemma" problem where collective actions cause the result that individually we would not like, but we feel we miss out if we don't participate ourselves and everybody else does. Here was the article entitled, "Boycott Facebook -- It's Creepy." It says below it takes links, but didnt put the link in either. link: http://donkasauruspost.com/2010/01/17/boycott-facebook-its-creepy/
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