Facebook: the privacy backlash

Facebook has gone rogue. Facebook has had its MySpace moment. Facebook is becoming too big for its own boots. You cannot expect your profile to be private anymore without a degree in Facebook privacy settings. It's time for an open alternative to Facebook as this Wired article proposes.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/

The sad truth mentioned in the article is that the reason Facebook has made so many privacy settings open by default is because you can't be online and expect things to be private anymore. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said it himself to a live audience this year. His exact words were:

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."

Although everything is out in the open, the excuse is misguided. These "norms" have formed, arguably, because of sites like Facebook that make it so easy for us to share information, and people don't always assume that this information can be read by anyone. They don't necessarily want these to be the "norm". Facebook has forced the norm upon us.