Among the dissenters is a Stanford law professor who researches and lectures on Internet privacy. He said Zuckerberg's assessment conflicts with recent academic findings.

"The picture is clearly more nuanced than Mr. Zuckerberg's comments would suggest," said Ryan Calo, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University's Law School. "I've seen several recent studies out of Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon, for instance, suggesting that people continue to value their privacy and are even willing to pay a premium for better privacy."

Getting Lost in the Crowd

Calo, author of the forthcoming book People Can Be So Fake: A New Dimension to Privacy and Technology Scholarship, said private speech is a driving force behind the Internet.

"[It] permits a previously unimaginable amount of anonymous speech," said Calo. "And if you look at broader offline trends, we're moving in droves from small towns, where everyone knows our name, to cities, where greater anonymity is the norm."

In an interview during the Crunchies award ceremony celebrating last year's best technology accomplishments, Zuckerberg painted his company as prophetic by reasoning in 2004 that the "social norm" in the near future would be more online sharing.

"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people," Zuckerberg said.

Michael Zimmer, an assistant professor in the school of information studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an associate at the Center for Information Policy Research who has done extensive research on social media, said Zuckerberg's comments seemed calculated to make users and advertisers feel more at ease with sharing online.

"That's the world he wants, so he makes statements to make it seem as if it is true," Zimmer said. "Social-network sites need users to share information, and any attempts to limit that sharing is contrary to SNS business models."

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?

So while increasing privacy controls are added, Zimmer said, "they typically are insufficient, and rhetoric like Zuckerberg's is just another version of this: Tell people that no one cares about privacy anymore, and then more people will think it's OK to share their information."

Zimmer took issue with Zuckerberg's assertion that "blogging has taken off in a huge way" as proof of a shift in social norms. "The fact that some people choose to blog about some aspect of their lives -- and most aren't even about one's personal life -- is in no way related to whether people are more willing to share details with networks of friends on social-networking sites. The two spheres are completely different; thus the correlation is simply invalid." (continued...)

1  |  2  |  Next Page >