20th Jan2010
Mark Zuckerberg: “I decide societal norms” (Are Facebook users lobotomized lemmings?)
All told its been an extraordinary week for trans Pacific business relations. Google served notice on China that it would do what ever it takes to protect the privacy of the data within gmail accounts of human rights activists. Meanwhile back in America Mark Zuckerberg gave an extraordinary interview where he posits his views on the declining utility of personal privacy. And since we apparently value our privacy less andl less and since the population of Facebook becomes more and more…..well, its a mere formality: lets just cut out the noise and lets have Mark decide what the social norms are and set privacy settings in Facebook accordingly.
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 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.
