If you still that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg takes the privacy of Facebook users seriously, you might change your mind if you read this.
Business Insider has a piece detailing an instant message exchange between Zuckerberg and a friend back when he was 19 and had launched Facebook in his dorm room. Zuckerberg said people were "dumb" trusting him with their data. Yes, he was only 19 but humor, as Sigmund Freud said, is a way of hiding aggression.
The latest revelations are unlikely to help Zuckerberg with Europe's privacy officials and the Electronic Frontier Foundation telling Facebook that its latest privacy settings are unacceptable. Facebook's new default settings mean that more private information is available to everyone or to members of very large networks than before. In effect what Facebook is doing is pushing more people into publicly sharing information.
The basic problem, as Guardian blogger Andrew Brown says, is that people get users mixed up with customers. They're not the same. "Anyone who supposes that Facebook's users are its customer has got the business model precisely backwards,'' Brown says. "Users pay nothing, because we aren't customers, but product. The customers are the advertisers to whom Facebook sells the information users hand over, knowingly or not."
Facebook's business model is built around people sharing information. It trades privacy for profits. Zuckerberg would agree with that and would probably tell you that anyone who hasn't worked that out yet is "dumb"
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