Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that the rise of social networks means people no longer have the same expectations of privacy online.
“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people,” Zuckerberg told attendees of the Crunchie awards in San Francisco. “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?’.”
People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people
“Then in the last five or six years, blogging has taken off in a huge way, and just all these different services that have people sharing all this information.”
The comments come off the back of Facebook’s recent privacy revamp, which was criticised by privacy advocates who claimed the service was pushing people to share all their information.
However, Zuckerberg defended the move, claiming the site was simply reflecting a shift in the public’s perception of privacy.
“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built,” he said. “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.”
“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,” he said.
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