Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, took to the stage at the All Things Digital D8 conference this week to have his say on the site's privacy debate.
A rather sweaty Zuckerberg – it must be hot under those convention lights – tried to explain Facebook's reasoning about privacy, explaining: "Privacy is very important to us. I think there are some misperceptions. People use Facebook to share and to stay connected.
"You don't start off on Facebook being connected to your friends, you've got to be able to find them. So having some information available broadly is good for that.
"Now, there have been misperceptions that we're trying to make all information open, but that's false. We encourage people to keep their most private information private. But some of the most basic information, we suggest that people leave public."
Social serendipity
When asked why people have to actually make steps to protect their privacy on the site, he explained rather cryptically that it's all about "serendipitous connections".
As for the backlash the site is getting, Zuckerberg noted: "I started building this when I was around 19 years old, and along the way, a lot of stuff changed. We went from building a service in a dorm room to running a service that 500 million people use."
During the interview Zuckerberg apparently looked so sweaty that his interviewee asked him to take his hoody off, saying: "You all right? We're not even yelling at you… yet."
In its live blog, All Things Digital said, jokingly, that this could be Zuckerberg's "Nixon moment".
Compared to Steve Jobs' interview at the conference, Zuckerberg was a lot less polished, although he did manage to throw a joke in, saying: "One of the things I try to do as CEO of this company is not make mistakes that other companies make. I make different ones."
Never a truer word said…
