Facebook's Paul Buchheit justifies increasing openness, less privacy
Facebook's Paul Buchheit, the Gmail creator who coined Google's “Don't be evil” slogan and later came to the social network through its FriendFeed acquisition, said he's found immense value in removing most privacy restrictions to his profile.
Context & Ripple Effects
Paul Buchheit's case for stripping privacy restrictions off his profile lands four months after Zuckerberg declared in January that the age of privacy is over, and it extends that argument with a different kind of credibility: Buchheit created Gmail and coined Google's 'Don't be evil' slogan before joining Facebook through the FriendFeed acquisition, so he speaks as a builder from the rival camp rather than as Facebook PR.
His intervention also collides with a live counter-framing — Bruce Schneier's April argument that privacy is really about control, not secrecy — which sets up 2010's defining dispute over whether default-open profiles are an inevitability or a choice platforms are making for users.
First-order effects
- Facebook gains a high-credibility technical voice endorsing openness beyond its own founders, hardening the company line that reduced privacy is a value proposition rather than a cost imposed on users.
Second-order effects
- Privacy advocates and skeptics like Schneier now have a named, quotable target: the 'openness is valuable' argument from inside Facebook invites direct rebuttal on control and consent grounds, sharpening the public debate competitors such as Google must also answer for their own products.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry's governing concept shifts from restricting access to managing visibility — with regulators and users eventually judging platforms not on how much they expose by default, but on how much granular control they return, a contest whose resolution was genuinely unsettled as of mid-2010.
The trend: Social platforms are normalizing default-public profiles by reframing privacy as personal value and control rather than protection, one executive endorsement at a time.