14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a short appearance for an on-stage interview at the Crunchies conference on Friday. He touched on some of the broad subjects surrounding Facebook at the moment, nothing spectacular, except his view on the recent privacy changes at the social network and online privacy as a whole, which has managed to create quite a stir over the weekend. In short, his view is that people's privacy expectations online have changed over the years and that many are much more comfortable sharing their life with the world. As such, Facebook's move to make everyone's information a lot more public by default is only the site adjusting to the social norms of the day.
"[I]n 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," Zuckerberg said.
He added that other companies its size might have been very reluctant on changing such a fundamental part of the service. "[W]e 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," he said.
On the face of it, his arguments make some sense, people are certainly a lot more open online than they were even a few years ago. And it's healthy for a company to be able to implement a huge change like this, with the risk of upsetting its users if it believes there are clear benefits in doing so.
But the fact is it's all just marketing spin. It's not the social norm that spurred the changes and it's not a sudden shift in the company's principles, the reasons have less to do with the fine points of corporate ethics and more to do with the bottom line. But before we even get to that, the arguments themselves don't actually stand up.
Zuckerberg says that society's expectations of online privacy have changed and that Facebook is just following suit. He points or hints at things like blogging, Twitter as examples of that. There's just one problem, as Read Write Web's Marshall Kirkpatrick also points out in a great write-up on the subject, Facebook is significantly larger than any other form of social media, blogging or Twitter, and larger than any other social network.
At 350 million users worldwide and counting, it's larger than blogging as a phenomenon and Twitter put together. Facebook doesn't follow social norms and trends, it creates and shapes them. Failing to recognize the company's own influence in this area is irresponsible, choosing to ignore it is worse.
For many years, Facebook has taken a hard stance on privacy and made it one of the central aspects of the service. The company claimed that its walled-garden approach was designed with its users’ best interest in mind. Everything stayed inside Facebook and outside services were closed off. But this may have been in Facebook's interest as well and some argued that this was just a way of keeping search engines, notably Google, from getting access to the increasingly valuable information and content on the social network, but there was little reason to doubt Facebook's good intentions at that point.
Now, though, it's saying that quite the opposite is true, the user's best interests are served by making everything a lot more public. Coincidentally, Facebook's own best interests are served by this change. Facebook started moving away from its historical stance on privacy at about the time Twitter started to get a lot of mainstream attention. Since then, even though Twitter's growth has pretty much stalled, it has established itself as the one source for real-time info and gotten deals with Google and Microsoft out of the process. Facebook recognized just how valuable this market could be and also that, if people were more open on the social network, it could squash Twitter before it became a real threat.
At the same time, the company has been growing at a huge pace and it may grow even more, no one can say for sure what the market saturation point is, but, by its own accounts, it's time to focus more on revenue. The company was supposed to be making about $500 million in 2009, not bad but not great either, even MySpace is doing better for now. Most of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising and advertising online equals page views. And with the abysmal rates social networks usually get for ads, it needs a lot of them. But for that you need more open content.
This doesn't mean that the move is a bad thing, it may very well turn out that people will eventually adjust and become comfortable with the new privacy settings and with making what used to be private more public. And it may prove to be beneficial. But, if it does happen, it won't be because that's what people wanted, it will be because Facebook pushed them to and not with the most altruistic reasons in mind.