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+--- Thread: Is Facebook committed to privacy of its users in your opinion? (/thread-111378.html)
Is Facebook committed to privacy of its users in your opinion? - . - 03-19-2014 04:50 AM
I saw and news report that the owner of Facebook does not respect the privacy of his users and that he stole the idea from his friends who sued him for $65 million. In my opinion they should be getting lifetime payments for the theft. As a Facebook user this is disappointing. What is your take on it?
What I mean about Facebook stealing the idea was because his friends helped him create the site not because a social network site was a new idea. I think you missed the point there and the story is confirmed, they were sued for $65 mil and it was settled already.
I think you missed another point. Facebook gives you the option of making your profile public or private. In the cases of when a person chooses to make it private how private is that information and is it some to marketers and is law enforcement and government allowed to have free will access to anyones information at any time without proper legal proceedures.
- JoelKatz - 03-19-2014 05:00 AM
No, Facebook is not committed to privacy. In fact, it's committed to eliminating people's expectation of privacy, and it's doing a really good job at that. Oddly, most people don't mind.
As for Facebook stealing an idea, no, that's absurd. There is nothing clever about the *idea* of Facebook. MySpace had the same idea. The earliest ideas that made Facebook unique turned out to be bad ones, such as being only for people from Harvard. What makes Facebook so successful is the brilliant implementation of the idea of a social networking site. And that wasn't stolen from anyone.
The lawsuit was somewhat about the theft of an idea, but I think most people agree that that's just spin. In reality, Zuckerberg settled because he defrauded the Winkelvoss twins by making them think that they were his business partners as he worked on his own implementation. At a minimum, this allowed him to get to market before them. (Not that this really mattered. MySpace was to that market long before any of them, and Facebook still won out, at least for now.)