Social Machinery

Facebook’s owner Mark Zuckerberg says that privacy norms have radically shifted during the last 6 years due to the rise of social networking sites.

According to him people don’t really want privacy these days, as they have gotten used to share personal information and being more open with more people. 

Zuckerberg said that “social norms” has evolved during the past years. “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.”

Is quite amazing to see how Zuckerberg pitch has changed 180 degrees from three years back, when he was preaching privacy control as a critical success factor of Facebook. Since 2006 Facebook privacy rules have been changing rapidly towards making user information more public, even if people want to keep it private. Most of these decisions has created an explosive negative buzz where most detractors are pointing out that Zuckerberg is changing privacy control by following his own goals.

Even do is pretty obvious to conclude that privacy is dead just because you can find so much personal information by just goggling someone, the reality is that we still have control of what information we are sharing. Most of the information you can find on places like Blogs, Facebook or Twitter is information that people decided consciously to make it public. Is true that social media make sharing, searching, syndication and creation simple, but still the information shared is controlled by individuals.

Facebook privacy strategy is dangerous. With more than 350 Million subscribers, the social networking giant think they can push users to be more open. They believe is possible to influence user’s perception about privacy. And to some extent they have been successful; a good example was the introduction of the news feed in 2006, which make Facebook a more interactive place. But the jury is still out on whether users will accept Zuckerberg imposing his own perspective about privacy control.