Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Company on the Verge of a Social Breakthrough
By Michiko Kakutani
Published New York Times: June 7, 2010

THE FACEBOOK EFFECT
The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World
By David Kirkpatrick
Illustrated. 372 pages. Simon & Schuster. $26.

     

Responding to growing user concerns about privacy and growing scrutiny from American and European regulators of privacy practices, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook.com, last month tried to explain his company’s core principles in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post.

Facebook, he said, was built around a few simple ideas: that “people want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them”; that if people have “control over what they share, they will want to share more”; and that “if people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world.

Never mind all the people who doubt whether a more connected world necessarily translates into a better, more trusting world. There are plenty of Facebook users who simply question its commitment to letting them easily control their own information. While the company responded to the public uproar over recent changes to its privacy policy (which made some profile details available to the public at large, and gave third parties more access to user data) by promising to roll out new, simplified privacy settings, its default position, as Time magazine recently noted, has long been to “automatically set users’ preferences to maximum exposure and then put the onus” on them to dial back access.

Not only has the promotion of user sharing fueled the company’s business, enabling data mining and highly directed advertising, but it’s also been part of the company’s almost utopian credo.

“Members of Facebook’s radical transparency camp, Zuckerberg included
,” David Kirkpatrick writes in “The Facebook Effect,” “believe more visibility makes us better people. Some claim, for example, that because of Facebook, young people today have a harder time cheating on their boyfriends or girlfriends. They also say that more transparency should make for a more tolerant society in which people eventually accept that everybody sometimes does bad or embarrassing things.”
Full review at NYT.

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