That’s what Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg would have you believe. Whether it’s a genuine reflection of what he sees as the new social norm or another attempt at copying and competing with Twitter, Zuckerberg went on the record at the Crunchies awards saying that “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people”. Consequently, Facebook will be an agent of what he sees as this societal paradigm shift.
The recent changes to Facebook’s privacy policies were both dramatic yet slightly less publicised than perhaps they should have been. Unless users are internet-savvy and keep up with social media news, many of them – especially less-frequent users of the site – the first they would have heard of it was a pop-up box asking in a fairly noncommittal manner whether they would like to update their privacy settings.
Without updating these settings, all the content you have posted on Facebook will default as public, meaning that anyone with an account can access every part of your profile; pictures, work information, contact details, all of it.
The statement from Zuckerberg emphasised phrases such as ‘evolution’ and ‘social norms’ and stated that ‘change was inevitable’ from Facebook’s opening model where all content was only visible to users on their friends lists.
Maybe Zuckerberg is correct; with the rise in blogging both in the written and video manner on sites such as YouTube, and the amount of people sharing the minutiae of their day to day lives on Twitter, it certainly seems that people are far more open to making their details public. Whether this extends to Facebook’s user base who are notoriously opposed to change remains to be seen.
Related posts: