Zuckerberg: Privacy anxiety is fleeting
news.cnet.com
news.cnet.com
<long_story... It was the summer of 2004 and I was anxiously awaiting my freshman year of college. Facebook had just been opened to schools beyond the Ivy League, and I distinctly remember being jealous of friends who were headed to USC in the fall, as they received .edu email addresses before many of the rest of us, and were consequently able to register "thefacebook" accounts first. I attended a smaller private university in Southern California, and Facebook went live on our campus roughly six weeks into that first semester.
It felt as if everyone—geeks, football players, rich white girls, international transfer students; seriously, everybody—holed up in their dorm rooms for the next week to play with their new vanity toy. And this wasn't the Facebook you all obsess over now: no apps, no statuses, no pictures, no official pages, no high/junior/elementary schoolers, few adults, really a different thing entirely. But it was enthralling.
I've seen every every major change in Facebook's offering since then, and Mark's right; Every time they've added, removed, or otherwise tweaked a feature, people have become "outraged," formed groups often numbering in the hundreds of thousands to express said outrage, then promptly gone back to not giving a shit and commenting on each other's pictures.
As a marketing/decision science wonk, I can relate to the expectation that people don't actually know what they want, and if asked explicitly to describe what they want, they're almost universally wrong. I get it. I also understand moving forward with features like personal photo uploads paired with user-generated metadata despite pushback from users. It was a year before the iPhone and two years before Android, how could they possibly be expected to understand...yet.
Nevertheless, I think this experience may have warped Mark's approach to his product and the feedback of his users. After a dozen instances of the feigned outrage/complacency/acceptance cycle, why wouldn't Mark (or any other Facebook employee) meet any criticism with "Don't worry, guys. You'll get it eventually." The user base keeps growing, most press coverage is glowing, and investment is flowing. What's the problem?
The problem is that as increasing numbers of people and businesses sink increasing amounts of time and money into this thing ("this thing" being Facebook specifically but also Internet identity/socialization/lifestyle in general), each feature, each policy decision has increasingly significant consequences in the real lives of real people. The problem is that "Should 16-year-olds be able to join our nascent social network?" is a fundamentally different problem than "As we continue to insist that we are your de facto identity on the Internet, do we have a responsibility to provide robust and usable tools to give our users some hope of controlling that identity?" Yet the response from Facebook hasn't changed, and it unfortunately amounts to "Cool it everybody, we've got this covered. You'll get it eventually."
On the topic of privacy on the web, Eric Schmidt famously claimed: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Pardon the expression, but fuck you, Eric. You were born in 1955. You do not and cannot understand what the experience of living a life on the Internet entails. If there were pictures of you from every party you attended in high school and college, presented such that your dopiest, most uncouth acquaintance had carte blanche to append whichever moronic comment first came to mind to the permanent record, and the company maintaining the system repeatedly defaulted your privacy settings to "make sure everyone on earth sees this shit," there is no question in my mind you'd be singing a different tune.
Mark thinks his users' immature preoccupation with privacy is fleeting. If that is truly the case, it's one more reason I think Facebook is fleeting. There seems to be this bizarre assumption that Facebook, as the social network which has to date been the most successful in attracting "normal" and old people, will remain the 800 lb. gorilla til kingdom come. Sorry to disappoint, old folks, but you'll all be dead soon and I don't much care where you post your status updates until then. Insofar as my generation is concerned, I've been a geek among normies my entire life. I went to private, Catholic, rich kid schools for nearly two decades, where I played sports, hung out with jocks I sometimes tolerated and rarely trusted, spent my weekends acting hopelessly awkward around the ladies from our all-girls Catholic "sister" schools (yes, this part of my personality fortunately improved in college), and went home at night to listen to Devo and Invisibl Skratch Piklz records, try to teach myself object-oriented programming, and talk to my Internet friends.
I've observed hordes of people who would insist vehemently that they're "not a 'tech person'" adopt and bail on AIM, adopt and bail on MySpace, and now they've all adopted Facebook. Perhaps Mark thinks there's something special about his creation which has drawn the attention of people who would otherwise be completely disinterested. That his product is so compelling/entrenched that it almost doesn't matter which decisions he/his company makes or who bitches about it, they'll come around eventually. I'd argue that there are more dyed-in-the-wool Internet citizens born every day, and with a much more sophisticated, internalized awareness of "how2internet" the only inherently compelling quality of Facebook is that the people they know and care about are already there. Facebook is far from a perfect product, and any competitor with a marginally better feature set, or shinier chrome, or just some dumb luck could signal the six-months-to-ghost-town countdown for Facebook like MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal and (fill in the blank) before it.
Given that assessments of Facebook's privacy controls and policy have grown more frequent and more scathing, one needn't look far to find opportunities to act as the disruptor in the continued evolution of our identities online.
Oh, and Mark, sweetie: if privacy concerns are soooo 2002, why's your profile on lockdown, bro? You got something to hide? Your unwillingness to chow down on your own dog food doesn't exactly instill confidence in the integrity of your position. Perhaps your investors, advisors, or ad-buyers have their own incentives to chip away at the privacy of your users. Or maybe you just need to kill privacy yourself before you'll be willing to take a seat at the table.
(edit: Changed double hyphens to emdashes. Oh, iPad.)
1984, Brave New World, THX-1138, Fahrenheit 451, Brazil, all of these are premised on societies where the majority of people are getting by, and are only passively inconvenienced. The problem is that the minority of people who object or deviate from society are crushed by the mechanism of the state (whatever that happens to be).
Privacy anxiety is an ephemeral screen on deeper fundamental issues about fairness and justice in society. Zuckerberg may be right that incorporating further privacy eroding features into society will be easy, but that doesn't make it right.
Regardless of what you think of Google, i at least give them credit that they recognize that the tech they build has scary implications, and that there are lines that they are not supposed to cross (at least, Eric Schmitt has said this a number of times). Zuckerberg does not seem to have any such compunction.
And, now that I think about, as Z is a college drop-out, maybe the role of higher education in general.
The ideas presented in all of the works you cite are ones someone focused on an engineering degree or a tech business to the exclusion of all else might have been exposed to in a broad education. And not just that, but the kind of training that teaches you to think more broadly, in terms other than the metrics that Z seems to restrict himself to.
There will always be those who won't stand for it... But there's not enough of them.
My real problem with Facebook and privacy isn't that it allows you to give it up, but that it takes it from you and then let's you opt out of it.
Giving things up should always be opt-in.
I've never understood why Facebook issues are labeled "privacy issues." The ability to willfully share something has nothing to do with privacy. There is only a privacy issue if you are unable to keep something private that you would rather be kept private.
A side thought> what would facebook be like today if they actually respected privacy legitimately?
* People worry about a new feature
* The feature sticks around and people do get more comfortable with it (this is where Zuckerberg ends)
* At some point the initial fears are realized and people become eternally disenchanted with the feature
So for example he mentions the Wall.
* People were nervous about the Facebook wall at first because they thought putting so much information about themselves in one easy to locate place was a bad idea.
* People got more comfortable with it because it was forced on them and nothing bad happened.
* Now what I'm starting to hear is more and more companies are requiring applicants to friend them when they apply for a job. Every person who told me an employer asked for access to their Facebook page has also told me they regretted some of the things on their wall and would be wary of it in the future.
So I see a backlash at the end of the road here. One Zuckerberg (understandably) doesn't want to face.
i'd do the same thing if an employer asked to search my apartment or read my email.
That's why he's an advocate of you giving it up.
It's really as simple as that.
People anxieties aren't fleeting after every update, what is fleeting are peoples assumptions that they can be open on facebook. These days, almost every time I take out my camera someone will inevitably asks me not to put the photos on facebook (not that I would anyway). Some friends have quit drinking because they know that if a picture of them drinking in their free time, which they are allowed to do could still ruin their career.
Facebook isn't making people more candid, its making us self-censor. That self censoring is moving from facebook back to the real world. Its very troubling.
Facebook Like tracking my movements forced me to install Disconnect in Chrome.
Yes, people adapt when they feel they have no choice, but that doesn't make it right.
The setup would have to remove all power a company has over my data, and I haven't seen a system proposed that would do that other than Diaspora. However I have zero faith in them being able to actually deliver as they've shown that they just don't understand how to deliver an open source product of this nature..
This is just human nature. Call it social politics, call it whatever you want, but human beings are not profile pages and will never be.
Facebook should be working with me to help manage my online identity, instead of acting like my privacy concerns aren't real.
No one presents the same face to the entire world. If Facebook really wants to be a bigger part of my online/social experience, they'll acknowledge and start acting on this fact.
I've noticed exactly that problem. I commented on some stupid photo my friend posted, and then my mom told me later "Aren't you and Phil supposed to be working?". Good natured of course but it made me realize that actually, Facebook is a really awful place to interact with my friends.
Well, maybe. If Facebook gets your parents and grandparents all playing Farmville, but loses (just) you, Facebook comes out ahead.
My grandma is on Facebook because I am and others she knows are. This is ultimately what sustains Facebook's success: The network effect. It's the "cool" thing to do. It's where everybody is, so you need to be.
Despite that, the network effect is very volatile. It's not something you can easily sustain. MySpace was where everybody was at one point too.
Facebook is fooling themselves if they think privacy isn't one of the areas they need to innovate.
Cool is taking a hard, miserable lifestyle and through persona making others yearn for it. The starving artist is "cool," Facebook is populist tripe.
But there is a lot of stuff i dont want to share with certain people. (Work,Family,Drinking Buddys etc.) Someone will come around and take a piece of his pie i`m sure about this. The social space is moving to fast and there a needs he does not want to address.
When access to our private information becomes systematically abused for power and profit, then people will be more than anxious about what they've given up.