January 14, 2010 by Matt Thomas
Mark Zuckerburg has poured petrol on the fires of the Facebook privacy debate by stating privacy is no longer a ‘social norm’. The comments came at the crunchie awards, a San Francisco ceremony that recognises technological achievement.
Zuckerburg was making the point that attitudes to personal information have changed over the last few years, drawing a comparison between the attitudes of people when he first started Facebook and now.
“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?… Then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way, and just all these different services that have people sharing all this information.”
The comments were no doubt intended to put facebook’s attitudes to privacy issues in context, though the speech is almost guaranteed to anger privacy advocates, who have long raged against what they see as the steady erosion of the right to privacy online. Zuckerberg However, is unrepentant.
“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.”
Related posts:
