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Mark Zuckerberg on Making Privacy Controls Simple

May 26, 2011 Sam Freeman Leave a comment

Mark Zuckerberg (TubeChop) talks about the notion of privacy and control in a statement released on YouTube. Zuckerberg states that ‘when people share more the world becomes more open and connected and in a more open world many of the biggest problems we face together will become easier to solve’. It appears that Zuckerberg is contending that in a more connected world many major problems and issues can be more effectively addressed in a larger forum where everyone is able to add to the solution process. An example of this situation of increased connection between people can be seen through the recent protests in Egypt. A Google executive has told sources that social networking played a vital role in the Egyptian revolt. A Facebook webpage was created, titled ‘we are all Khaled Said’; the site condemned the killing of an Alexandrian businessman by the Egyptian police. The web page allowed for people to organise protests and demonstrations, which eventually led to the day of revolt in the 25^th January (Wilson, 2011).

However, the Facebook privacy changes have come under some criticism from the media and social commentators, Barnett (2011) from The Telegraph reported that ‘from last December onwards, all Facebook’s users’ status updates are made publicly available unless the user actively opts to change the settings and make it private’. Facebook has also recently signed deals with both Google and Microsoft’s Bing to allow people’s Facebook status updates to be searchable through both search engines. Criticism was also received from Internet users’ rights groups who claim that the recently changed privacy settings giving people the opportunity to change settings on videos and photographs uploaded to the site, was ‘a way for Facebook to facilitate more people making more personal information publicly available without realising it’ (Barnett, 2011).

Dan Fletcher (2011) from Time Magazine comments on Facebook’s privacy issues stating that ‘In April, (2010) Facebook rolled out a new system called the Open Graph, creating the now ubiquitous “like” button, allowing users to share their interests from around the web’ (Fletcher, 2011). The major criticism with the new “like” button addition was that is was very hard to hide once it had been clicked or commented on and additionally, with Facebook ‘automatically opting users into a new “Instant Personalization” feature on certain third-party websites’ caused many to complain about the new privacy features (Fletcher, 2011). Fletcher argues that through a user revolt and rumours of a possible investigation from the Federal Communications Commission (2009), a department of government in charge of regulating ‘communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable’, Facebook altered its privacy settings allowing more control over what information was made public.

Zuckerberg has responded to criticisms over Facebook privacy issues contending that society is evolving, people are becoming more willing to share information with each other than ever before, additionally stating ‘in the last five or six years, blogging has taken off in a huge way, and just all these different services that have people sharing all this information’ (Barnett, 2011). In further defense of privacy changes made to Facebook, Zuckerberg stated that the changes were made in response to changes in social norms that conveyed people are more willing to share their lives with other people and the notion of privacy is a thing of the past.