Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook spent December dismantling the private-by-default settings it had kept for years, and Zuckerberg's live-audience remark completes the repositioning in rhetoric: he says that if he were founding the company today, user information would be public from day one. The statement converts what could have been read as a controversial settings change into an explicit philosophy.
Timing matters because Facebook enters 2010 at extraordinary scale — an audience large enough to rank behind only China and India among world populations — and eMarketer projects it will pass MySpace in worldwide ad revenue this year, at $605 million versus MySpace's projected $385 million. Publicness is also operational: the company is separately testing the crowd-sourced Community Council for removing inappropriate content, moderation infrastructure that matters more when more material sits in the open.
First-order effects
- Facebook's roughly 350 million users now live with information shared by default following the December flip, a reversal of the private defaults the site maintained for most of its history.
- Advertisers are the direct beneficiaries: a more open data environment supports the ad-revenue growth eMarketer forecasts for 2010, when Facebook is projected to overtake MySpace.
Second-order effects
- MySpace and rival networks face pressure to either match the public-default posture or justify their own settings differences, turning privacy configuration from a back-end choice into a competitive talking point.
- Facebook's own moderation tooling comes under strain: the Community Council experiment on crowd-sourced removal of inappropriate content gains urgency precisely because default-public sharing increases the volume of exposed material.
Third-order effects
- If the largest social network declares openness inevitable and builds its product around it, public-by-default risks becoming the web's baseline assumption — with the platform, not the user, deciding the default that functions as de facto policy.
- That concentration of default-setting power in a handful of companies is exactly the kind of arrangement likely to draw regulator and user-trust challenges, though whether pushback materializes at scale is genuinely unresolved.
The trend: Social networks are shifting privacy from a user-controlled setting to a platform-set default, making whoever owns the default the effective author of the web's privacy policy.