Mark
Zuckerberg Has Never Cared About Your Privacy, and He Is Not Going to
Change
From
Facebook’s earliest days, Zuckerberg has followed the same pattern: take
two steps forward, only to be pushed one step backward and land exactly
where he wanted to be.
In
May 2010, not for the first time, people were in an uproar about
Facebook. The social network had recently revised its privacy policy to
require users to opt out of features that tracked them on the site,
suddenly making private information public by default. Making matters
worse, that personal data was being shared with third-party partners,
and a lot of users were extremely worried about the ramifications. If
you think people aren’t very technically minded today, back in 2010, it
was worse, and people who used Facebook (more than 400 million at the
time) were frantically trying to force the company to switch back to the
private-by-default setting.
At
the time, I was a reporter at
The
New York Times,
and my editor asked me to write a short blog post explaining how to
switch your settings on Facebook to private. I remember sitting in my
cubicle in the newsroom, clicking around while I took notes about the
privacy settings. Several hours later, I was still clicking.
The
piece I
ended
up writing
pointed out that to truly opt out of sharing all your personal
information, you had to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, and
then choose between more than 170 total options. There were some options
that you couldn’t even opt out of at all. I also noted that Facebook’s
Privacy Policy at the time was 5,830 words long; the original United
States Constitution, meanwhile, is a concise 4,543 words. In other
words, the illegible mumbo jumbo you had to read through on a
social-network Web site was so complex, it was longer than the rules
that govern the entire United States.
The
story at the time had a happy ending. Facebook succumbed to pressure,
fixed its privacy settings, apologized, and the story went away. But it
didn’t take long for Facebook to try and screw over its users again. And
again and again and again. Year after year, I—along with countless other
outlets—wrote articles about Facebook
changing
its privacy policy
to benefit the company, then fixing it just
enough
to appease the masses, then doing
it all over again. And year after year, writing about Zuckerberg,
I started to learn something interesting about him and the company: the
entire strategy was to take two steps forward, only to be pushed one
step backward and land exactly where Zuckerberg and Facebook wanted to
be.
Now,
on the heels of the latest scandal, people are rightly asking if it’s time
for Zuckerberg himself to take one step back and
resign
as Facebook chairman. But anyone I’ve spoken to who knows Zuckerberg says
it’s beyond unlikely that he’s going anywhere. Zuckerberg fought tooth and
nail to win the control he has over Facebook—a two-class stock structure
that practically ensures he can’t be ousted—and he’s certainly not going
to give it up anytime soon, unless either the board or the government
force him to. As the entrepreneur and author Scott
Galloway,
who wrote the book The
Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google,
recently told me, “An African dictator has more job insecurity than Mark
Zuckerberg.”
Sure,
the government could break up the company—which many, myself included,
believe it should. But it didn’t do it when Zuckerberg and Facebook
repeatedly harmed people with the platform in the past, and I’m not sure
what it will take for someone to finally bring down the hammer where it
deserves to land. As for the board, from a numbers standpoint, Zuckerberg
(and the board) likely don’t believe there should be a change at the
company. While there are clearly some people who are using the platform
less, most people apparently don’t care what happens on Facebook. Just
look
at the numbers
to see how evident that is.
Facebook
still has over 2.27 billion monthly active users who collectively spend
more than 100 million years—yes, years—of time on the site each and every
day. They upload 300 million photos per day, leave 750 million comments a
day, and share billions upon billions of pieces of content each day. It
doesn’t matter to most of them that Facebook is a haven for fake news, or
that their personal information is being sold to advertisers, or that
their C.E.O. and C.O.O. have done things that should get them both fired,
without even the blink of an eye. For most people, they’re just happy that
someone “liked” the photo they took of that sunset on the beach last
weekend. And I truly don’t believe, as much as I wish, that Zuckerberg is
going to change his stripes to be a good guy with a good conscience. As
Jim
Rutenbergwrote
in the Times
last weekend, we’ve known exactly who Zuckerberg is for a long time.
Referring to the movie The
Social Network,
Rutenberg noted that, “[Zuckerberg’s] journey to moguldom began ignobly,
with Facemash.com, a mean-spirited site that encouraged his fellow male
students at Harvard College to rate women on campus by their looks.”
The
seeds of Zuckerberg’s corporate strategy—act first, apologize later—were
also evident in those early days. Back in 2003, after a massive backlash
to Facemash, a sophomore Zuck explained in an
e-mail
to The
Crimson
why he was taking down the site. “I understood that some parts were still
a little sketchy and I wanted some more time to think about whether or not
this was really appropriate to release to the Harvard community,” he
wrote, shortly before he was called before Harvard’s administrative board
and accused of violating data security, copyrights, and individual
privacy. “Issues about violating people’s privacy don’t seem to be
surmountable,” he continued. “I’m not willing to risk insulting anyone.”
At around the same time, according to chat
logs
that have since surfaced, Zuckerberg told a friend over instant messenger
that he had over 4,000 e-mails, pictures, and addresses of people who had
signed up for an early version of thefacebook.com. When the friend asked
how Zuckerberg got that information, he replied: “people just submitted
it; i don’t know why; they ‘trust me’; dumb fucks.”
Seven
years later, Zuckerberg was C.E.O. of a data-mining platform millions of
times larger than the one he first tested at Harvard—but still equally
evasive on the issue of user privacy. Shortly after I had written my piece
about Facebook’s privacy policy in May 2010, the company apologized for
its mistakes, changed its policy, and made it easier—albeit not much—to
opt out of always being opted in. In April of that year, I reached out to
a senior level employee at the company, and I asked them how Zuckerberg
truly felt about privacy. The employee laughed out loud with a roaring
cackle and said, “He doesn’t believe in it.”
For
years, we expected Zuckerberg to evolve. To grow up and become a good guy.
But what the latest scandal reveals is what he has been showing us for
more than a decade: Zuckerberg is who he is, and that’s not going to
change.