Privacy and Control
In January, Facebook Chief Executive, Mark Zuckerberg, declared the age of privacy to be over. A month earlier, Google Chief Eric Schmidt expressed a similar sentiment. Add Scott McNealy's and Larry Ellison's comments from a few years earlier …
Context & Ripple Effects
Schneier's essay lands three months after Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg's January declaration that "the age of privacy is over", a line ReadWriteWeb had already amplified. His contribution is to place that remark in a lineage: Google chief Eric Schmidt voiced a matching sentiment a month earlier, and Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison said versions of the same thing years before either.
That repetition is the point of the piece — what was once an outlier provocation from Sun and Oracle leadership has become coordinated-sounding orthodoxy among the executives running the largest consumer data platforms. When the people setting Facebook's and Google's product defaults argue that privacy expectations are finished, the burden of protecting personal information shifts from platform design to individual users.
First-order effects
- Facebook and Google users face sharing defaults shaped by leadership that has publicly dismissed privacy expectations, pushing the work of limiting exposure onto individuals through opt-outs rather than opt-ins.
- Privacy critics such as Schneier now have named CEOs on record — Zuckerberg, Schmidt, and earlier McNealy and Ellison — turning a diffuse concern about data practices into a concrete, attributable argument.
Second-order effects
- Any rival service that keeps visible, granular privacy controls gains a differentiation wedge against Facebook and Google, whose own chiefs have framed privacy as obsolete.
- Regulators and lawmakers scrutinizing Facebook's and Google's data handling receive quotable evidence from the companies' own executives that consumer expectations are being treated as negotiable.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, "privacy is over" functions as rhetorical groundwork laid ahead of each loosening of defaults — an industry-wide framing device that makes data-centric business models feel inevitable until user backlash or rulemaking pushes back.
- Norm-setting authority migrates from consumers to executive pronouncement: platforms define how much disclosure is acceptable, and users inherit those definitions as social defaults.
The trend: Consumer-platform chiefs are reframing diminished privacy expectations as an accomplished fact, normalizing public-by-default data practices faster than users or regulators have agreed to them.