That’s right. The days of sharing information with a small group of friends is no more and guess who you have to thank, Twitter. I believe that this shift in privacy was inevitable, but you’ve got to think Twitter’s surge in popularity put a lot of pressure on Facebook to open up on their privacy settings. In a recent interview with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said if he were to create Facebook starting today, user information would by default be public. According to Zuckerberg:
“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’
And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. 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.
We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.
A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. 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.”
I imagine this will continue to be a HUGE issue with Facebook going forward. Recently, Facebook notified users of privacy changes via a pop-up notification and if you were like me and just clicked through the pop-up, you were in fact making much of your data public. Check out this YouTube video, Facebook privacy settings: What you need to know, to learn more about how the new privacy changes will effect you.
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