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Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Claims Privacy Is Dead

by Terrence O'Brien on January 11, 2010 at 03:10 PM

Mark Zuckerberg Says Privacy is Over
Recent changes in the way that Facebook handles privacy and user information has set off a firestorm of controversy -- largely due to formerly private content having been exposed to the public. Still, Mark Zuckerberg apparently feels that he hasn't been publicly attacked enough. The Facebook CEO recently begged people to hurl criticism at him when he essentially told TechCrunch's Michael Arrington that the age of Internet privacy was over.

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]

Tags: eric schmidt, EricSchmidt, facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, MarkZuckerberg, privacy, top

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