[DANNY WOOL, SV411]
There’s a lot of talk going on about whether Facebook has any respect for privacy anymore. Even CNN has started asking questions, which means that Rick Sanchez is getting kind of worried. But rather than reading the novelesque new Privacy Policy or trying to make heads or tails of what that policy really means, it’s probably best to go right to the source, in this case, founder/CEO/geek extraordinaire Mark Zuckerberg himself.
In a private IM to a college buddy when Zuckerberg was still at Harvard, he boasted that he had already collected 4,000 emails, photos, and whatnot from his peers. When asked why they gave entrusted this to him, Zuckerberg was remarkably candid.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
There you have it, folks, summed up succinctly.
Of course, that was seven years ago, when Facebook was (literally) 100,000 times smaller than it is now. Zuckerberg is now a whopping 26 and shaving every day. And yet, some things never change, including his disdain for privacy, it seems.
These days, people are trying to break free of Facebook, even if it’s not always that easy. One site that is helping people do that is WikiHow, which has a page about how to permanently delete your Facebook page. Chances are it’s getting much more attention than How to Build a Bat Box.
While the number of people quitting Facebook is still rather small, the company seems to be worried. So worried, in fact, Eliot Schrage answered users’ questions (after eight paragraphs of pablum) in the New York Times this Tuesday. Schrage knows of what he speaks (or doesn’t speak). He is the company’s VP for Public Policy. His response was a legalistic variant of “tough shit.” He wrote: “Everything is opt-in on Facebook. Participating in the service is a choice.” In other words, once you join our site, you get your privacy invaded, unless you take the kind of measures of which the Good Book implies, “It is easier for a Facebook user to get through the eye of a needle than to get to privacy heaven.”
But that is just one indication that Facebook is worried. Another is the report in CNET that Facebook is considering an “all hands” meeting to discuss the new privacy meeting and its implications on the site’s popularity or lack thereof. As Jason Calanis, himself no stranger to controversy, recently posted in his blog,
“The biggest mistake most new players make at poker is overplaying their hand. … Over the past month, Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in town, has overplayed his hand. Facebook is officially ‘out,’ as in uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the realization that Zuckerberg and his company are—simply put—not trustworthy.”
Calacanis goes on to point out that even Zynga CEO Mark Pinkus is look to break with Facebook. As a reminder, Pinkus is the man who boasted that he did “every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away.”
So, with this all in mind, what can really be said about people who trust Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook? It’s time to go back to the source, and that source called them “dumb fucks.”