Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is reported as having changed his mind about privacy. The recent set of changes to the site’s T&Cs in December – which rendered members’ names, profile picture, gender, network, fan pages and friends visible to the world unless they explicitly changed their settings – merely reflects societal norms,  Zuckerberg says. People aren’t that worried about privacy any more, he claims:

…in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

“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.

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change — doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

As Read/Write Web points out, the suggestion that blogging and possibly Twitter have wrought a worldwide alteration in people’s attitudes to privacy seems disingenuous. While both are quite popular, neither forces people to reveal their identity to the extent that Facebook does. With 350mn users, largely concentrated in Western Europe and the US, the network holds considerably more sway over cultural mores than blogs. Facebook is not following changes in society, it is creating them.

And what is this suggested link between blogging and giving up privacy? There are plenty of anonymous blogs and pseudonymous Twitter accounts. Heck, there are plenty of personal blogs and Twitter accounts that don’t show as much personal information as a Facebook account. There’s nothing inherent in either blogs or Twitter that forces the disclosure of your friends, gender, appearance and affiliations, while it’s the raison d’être of Facebook.

The other thing is that right or not about social norms, Facebook has changed the rules mid-game. You’ve already disclosed whatever you decided to disclose to your friends on the network under the old rules. You didn’t opt-in for greater visibility than you initially signed-up to. While Zuckerberg may be cultivating a ‘beginner’s mind’, that might be less true of the people who joined the network before last December.

To be fair, Zuckerberg’s point of view, as expressed in this interview, is no different to that of most web-savvy people. If you go on the Web, then you leave an indelible digital trail — so get used to the idea and act accordingly. We’ve all known that for years. However, it is rather surprising to find Zuckerberg both acknowledging and promoting this view. The normal line taken by social network execs is ‘don’t you worry your pretty head about privacy – we’ll keep you safe.’ There’s commercial advantage in this. If people feel safe, then they’ll be more open about what they reveal about themselves. If people are more open, the social network will be able to better target users demographically and behaviourally. Its advertising will be more effective and thus more easily sold.

This new approach – ‘no-one cares about privacy any more: get over it’ – seems like a mistake to me, unless he is thinking that the traffic uplift from search engines will raise enough revenue to allow a swift IPO and exit before anyone realises what’s happening.

picture credit: Max-B