SURPRISE! Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has never really cared much about your privacy, or your right to decide your own privacy. Which is why he recently convened a secret meeting to get ahead of growing attacks on Facebook’s incredible lack of respect for privacy.
If the above words of then 19-year-old Facebook founder Zuckerberg alarms you, it should. And allegation that Zuckerberg once used information from Facebook’s logs to hack into Harvard Crimson reporters’ email accounts certainly doesn’t help his track record on this sort of thing. Facebook’s official response:
The privacy and security of our users’ information is of paramount importance to us. We’re not going to debate claims from anonymous sources or dated allegations that attempt to characterize Mark’s and Facebook’s views towards privacy.
While the vast majority of Facebook’s users might not think twice about what the site does with information they post in their profiles, there is a contingent that is concerned, growing in size and becoming increasingly vocal.
Late last week, the powers that be at Facebook were called together for an urgent meeting on the increasingly troubling subject of privacy. Facebook’s vice-president of public policy Eilliot Schrage, tried to answer some questions about privacy posed by readers of The New York Times last week, right when some at Facebook and the real world were starting to feel a bit queasy. Schrage rationalized that “joining Facebook is a conscious choice by vast numbers of people who have stepped forward deliberately and intentionally to connect and share.” But users are fighting back with the thought that they’d still prefer choosing whom they share things with, rather than having Facebook do the choosing for them.
Will Facebook ever learn that privacy is NOT dead and still matters to many?
