Facebook CEO says "Privacy is no longer a social norm"

The 25 year old billionaire and founder of the world's largest soclal networking website declared at the Crunchie Awards in San Francisco that:

'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."

'When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was, 'why would I want to put any information on the internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'

'Then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way, and just all these different services that have people sharing all this information.'

Of course, given all the recent controversy surrounding Facebook's unilateral decision to alter the privacy settings for its 350 million users, Mark Zuckerberg's statements may be a bit of a rationalization. 

According to those interviewed by The Guardian, not everyone agrees with Zuckerberg's stance on privacy:

Marshall Kirkpatrick, of the technology industry blog ReadWriteWeb, said Zuckerberg's statement was 'not a believeable explanation' and pointed to the company's complicity in changing the way people think about online privacy.

Meanwhile, others have rejected the idea that younger people, in particular, are less concerned about privacy. Last month Microsoft researcher and social networking expert Danah Boyd told the Guardianthat such assumptions often misunderstood the reasons that people put private information online.

'Kids have always cared about privacy, it's just that their notions of privacy look very different than adult notions,' she said.

'As adults, by and large, we think of the home as a very private space … for young people it's not a private space. They have no control over who comes in and out of their room, or who comes in and out of their house. As a result, the online world feels more private because it feels like it has more control.'

You can read the rest here courtesy of The Guardian.

Hat tip to the BNA Internet Law News.

(jbl)