Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Believe In Privacy

Unless I'm misreading something, it would be far more accurate to say: "Some FB employee jokes that Zuck doesn't believe in privacy"

I don't remember who said it, but a few months ago an HN commenter brilliantly paraphrased an interview with Zuck on privacy:

"When I was trying to get people to give me access to their private information, I bent over backwards to assure them that privacy was our highest concern.

When I found out how much advertisers were willing to pay for access and targeting across that information, I suddenly stopped believing in privacy."

Assuming this is accurate, you should watch your mouth, Zuck, or priv.gc.ca might bring the hammer down. Again.

Other users in other countries can resign themselves whenever they like, but Canadians aren't willing to just give up on privacy because it's a challenge for service providers. It's a duty if you want to do business here.

The market doesn't believe in privacy either, so Facebook is still OK.

Ad Eric Schmidt would say... if there's something you don't want Facebook to know about, don't tell Facebook!

Given he would only admit to something like that "off the record" tells me that Zuckerberg certainly believes in privacy - just not other peoples privacy.

When I signed up on Facebook, all I knew was that everything I typed in was essentially becoming public knowledge.

Closed profiles that only "friends" can see? Yeah, only friends, and all the nefarious people who constantly hack your friends profiles because they access FB through IE on virus-ridden copies of Windows.

Facebook's mistake was ever pretending that your information on that site was somehow private or protected.

I'd like to know what they mean by "believing in privacy". If I understand the Wikipedia correctly[1], privacy is just the sum of information that is exclusive to an entity (person, circle of friends, family, company…).

So, does Zuckerberg believe there is little or no such information? Or does he believe there should be little or no such information? Does he believe that people don't control their privacy, or that they shouldn't? When he says he "doesn't believe in privacy", does he state a fact, or a political opinion?

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy

I think it's important that everyone has the same level of access to privacy - whatever the defined level is. So if no-one has any privacy whatsoever, that's fine with me since everyone has their dirty laundry in public (and so everyone becomes numb to personal information). The real damage and discrimination seems to arise when there's a privacy (and information) imbalance between people or groups.

I think this was pretty obvious once Facebook totally revamped their privacy settings and set the defaults to be as public as possible.

Smart move on Zuck's part. It is better to take the heat for this now than end up as another widely popular communication platform with a limited timespan(ICQ, Friendster, Hotmail etc.).

Good business move!