One of the most significant changes in the last couple of decades has been the rise of social media and the way it’s reshaped society. Mark Zuckerberg, who co-founded and launched Facebook – and now leads the technology conglomerate Meta – has played a key role in what he describes as an erosion of privacy.
“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information – and different kinds – but more openly with more people. And that social norm is just something that’s evolved over time.”
We were just months away from Mark Zuckerberg’s first on-screen portrayal in The Social Network when he spoke about the story of Facebook so far at TechCrunch’s Crunchies awards in January 2010.
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During the interview, he spoke about the way that people’s attitudes toward their own sense of privacy had shifted, and that with the tools available on the web – including his own platform – users were far more open and willing to share details about themselves.
He delivered these thoughts following criticism that Facebook had altered its architecture so that basic information, like your friends list, became publicly viewable by default – unless you consciously opted out.
The death of privacy
Zuckerberg, at the time, was attempting to reframe his platform’s changes as ones that served users as it adapted to their behavior. But it’s also fair to suggest that Facebook had also played a role in triggering behavioral shifts in its users in the first place.
Cynics would also suggest that the shift to opening up more data to public access paved the way for further monetization of user data. This would come in the form of Open Graph, which the company launched in May that same year.
People have continued to share their information online, but they aren’t feeding simple algorithms or monetization portals, but AI models too.
On the other hand, the modern age has given rise to more encrypted services like WhatsApp, Signal and Discord, with mostly open platforms, like Facebook’s previous incarnation, suffering from data collection scandals and privacy breaches.
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