Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, has a history of exhibiting a cavalier attitude towards privacy. Recently, the internet has been abuzz with a transcript of an instant message exchange between then 19-year-old Zuckerberg ("Zuck") and an unidentified friend shortly after The Facebook was first launched in six years ago, in 2004. The instant message exchange reads:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb f****.

Zuckerberg's attitude, while reflective of his generation, raisesflags because Facebook is a $22 billion and the leading pioneer in the online social-networking market. To date, Facebook has over 400 million active users, which translates into an astounding amount of personal information on individual users. Facebook has been under a great deal of scrutiny for its implement-changes-first, do-damage-control-after approach to its privacy policy, but as fast as Facebook has grown, maybe this cavalier approach is the way to go. In just a over six years, Facebook has gone from a small single-school (Harvard University) network to an international online community. 500 million people visit the site each month (the only websites that get more hits than Facebook are Google, Microsoft and Yahoo). Facebook is growing at an unprecedented pace, and it's changing the Web. No other social-networking website can make these claims, but then again, no other social-networking websites are constantly being criticized for privacy violations. Could it be that this kind of progress can only be had at the expense of a little personal privacy?

http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/13/the-media-attacks-on-facebook-and-mark-zuckerberg-are-getting-out-of-hand/
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/25/the-age-of-facebook/

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