After facing a myriad of privacy concerns from users and other groups, Facebook’s (News - Alert) founder and CEO said that sharing information online is the new “social norm” and that the company’s privacy policies continue to evolve to coincide with what users’ comfort-levels are.
Last month, the company announced that it was calling on its more than 350 million users to review and update their privacy settings – what company officials called “a first among major Internet services.”
“When we first started Facebook in my dorm room in Harvard [in 2004], people asked me why would I want to have any information at all on the Internet,” the 25-year-old Zuckerberg said at the annual Crunchies awards ceremony sponsored by TechCrunch. “But the social norm has evolved over time.”
“We focused a lot on the past few years on helping our users spread Facebook worldwide,” and that effort is still continuing Zuckerberg said.
“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the type of thing that a lot of companies would do,” Zuckerberg said.
“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people ... 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.”
Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” such as communities for schools, companies or regions. However, some of the regional networks like Australia and Turkey now have millions of members, which is why Facebook is moving toward a more personalized model of control, company officials said. Regional networks will be removed and replaced with four basic control settings: “friends,” “friends of friends,” “everyone” and “customized,” which apply uniformly to all users worldwide.
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