In essence, what Facebook had created was a way to “subscribe” to information about a friend. Instead of waiting for a friend to send you information, now you told Facebook—merely by being friends with someone—that you wanted to hear about them. To friend them was to subscribe to their data, so that Facebook’s software would pull their information to your page. The main precedent for such a subscription model was the first well-known system for feeds—RSS (Really Simple Syndication). RSS had become popular along with blogging a few years earlier. It was a way to subscribe to the output of a given blog or website. RSS feeds had become a routine way for Web denizens to receive news, commentary, and many other types of information. Applying it to behavioral information about people, however, was a radical departure for the Net and would prove to be hugely influential.
But in their anger about the News Feed students were nonetheless recognizing something important and, for many, genuinely disturbing—when people can see what you are doing, that can change how you behave. The reason the News Feed evoked something as intrusive as stalking was that each individual’s behavior was now more exposed. It was as if you could see every single person you knew over your backyard fence at all times. Now they could more easily be called to account for their actions.
Facebook had acquired the power to push people toward consistency, or at least to expose their inconsistencies. Once everything you do is laid out in chronological order for your friends to see, that may allow people to recognize things about you that they never previously knew, whether for good or ill. If you smoked a joint and a friend happened to snap a photo, that photo might get posted on Facebook. If you held a party and didn’t invite a friend, they were now more likely to find out about it. You were asked to declare whether you were “in a relationship” or “single.” You couldn’t tell one girl one thing and another girl another. Any change in your relationship status would get pushed out on the News Feed.
Another reason many Facebook users were upset with the News Feed was more unsurprising—they had accepted too many “friends.” Facebook was designed as a way to communicate with people you already knew. But for many it had instead become a way to collect friends, even a competition to see who could have the most. But if your behavior was going to be broadcast to everyone on your friend list, people who had engaged in rampant friending now had little control over who saw into their private lives.
In his planning for News Feed and his response to the revolt, Zuckerberg established a pattern he would repeat in future controversies. He pushed for News Feed out of his conviction that it was the logical next step for the service. He did not give sufficient consideration in advance to how it would impact users’ sense of privacy, and more importantly, how it would make them feel. Not everyone appreciated the transparency that Zuckerberg envisioned. One person’s openness was another person’s intrusiveness. Zuckerberg resisted criticism at first, then capitulated and turned contrite. In the end he embraced dialogue with the protesters. Facebook’s iterative approach to all things prevailed. And more or less, all was well.
Despite the rocky start for News Feed, Zuckerberg considered it critical that Facebook continue expanding its reach. He still wanted to move quickly toward open registration. He wanted this not because he wanted more users so Facebook could make more money; instead he thought that Facebook was more useful as it acquired more users. At lunch on September 8 he said, “Whenever we expand the network, that makes the network stronger.”
Zuckerberg also never considered mothballing the open registration plan. He and his colleagues, Chris Hughes and public relations manager Melanie Deitch, did debate among themselves at our lunch whether to open up as planned the following week or to delay open reg to allow the News Feed hullabaloo to die down.
In the end Zuckerberg delayed open registration by just two weeks, until September 26. That was partly so that additional privacy controls could be added to ensure that student users didn’t feel that new, older users coming in following open registration would shadow them. He wasn’t going to make exactly the same mistake twice in one month.
But there was another distraction during those same weeks that took up a lot of Zuckerberg’s time—Yahoo returned. Even after the company’s stock had plummeted in July and it had retreated from its billion-dollar offer, CEO Semel still badly wanted to own Facebook. He and his staff watched the explosion of the News Feed controversy and its rapid denouement as Zuckerberg deftly addressed the objections. They were impressed. Separately, Yahoo’s stock had regained more than half the value it lost in July, bolstering Semel’s nerve.
Now Semel reapproached Zuckerberg with the surprising news that he wanted to renew his original $1 billion purchase offer. He even suggested he might go higher. This was a new situation.
Though Zuckerberg had stayed coolheaded during the News Feed crisis, the young CEO was now unnerved. His users suddenly seemed less predictable. And the failure of the work networks continued to gnaw at him. He was losing confidence in the prospects for open registration, which would launch in mere days. And he had promised the board he would take a billion-dollar offer seriously.
Zuckerberg and Breyer had a blunt conversation. Both clearly recalled the stress of the earlier negotiations. Zuckerberg began to wonder if in fact he ought to sell the company. “I want to keep our options open,” he told Breyer. “If the number of users and engagement is not growing steadily after open registration, maybe that billion or billion-one is something I’d want to do.”
Open registration and the launch of the address-book importer became a make-or-break test of Facebook’s long-term viability. Would it flop as work networks had? Were adults ever going to want to join Facebook?
Open registration launched on September 26. Every day for the next two weeks, a group of six pored over the latest data. The group included Zuckerberg, Breyer, Peter Thiel, COO Van Natta, “consigliere” Cohler, and co-founder Moskovitz. In the last few days of September the data was nerve-rackingly unclear, which meant that a sale might be imminent. Yahoo’s lawyers were again conducting due diligence, getting ready for a deal. Sean Parker was watching closely from the sidelines, appalled. “We almost took the offer,” he says. “It was the only time Mark felt he couldn’t withstand the pressure from his teammates.”
But Zuckerberg’s confidence in Facebook’s strategy was again vindicated. One colleague remembers being in the CEO’s all-white private conference room during these weeks when somebody burst in and announced “Ten million! This is so great!” Reaching that many users was a major milestone in the company’s growth.
After about a week it was apparent that not only were adults joining Facebook, but once inside they were inviting friends, posting photos, and doing all the other things that active users did. They were engaged. Prior to open registration, new users were joining at a rate of about 20,000 a day, but by the second week in October the figure was 50,000. And students didn’t rise up against the new adult users as some had feared. Perhaps the News Feed ruckus had worn users down. Or maybe they were so busy checking out all the stuff they were learning about on News Feed that they didn’t have time to protest.
Breyer, in particular, was assuaged by the results of open registration. “Opening it up kicked in new usage,” recalls Breyer. “At that point, it was pretty much game over. Our growth numbers looked good. And we just said, ‘We’re not ready to sell.’”
The company may have remained intact, but some of Zuckerberg’s relationships did not. In the months that followed, his dealings with Breyer were strained. Van Natta had pushed so hard for a sale to Yahoo that Zuckerberg never fully trusted him again, according to one of Zuckerberg’s close friends. Van Natta remained as COO for another year. Even Cohler, one of Zuckerberg’s closest confidants, felt the tension. For a while Cohler was excluded from the inner circle. Says an adviser to Zuckerberg, “Mark is all about loyalty to the company, and if you want to sell the company you’re not friends to Mark Zuckerberg. Mark remembers every
body who was in favor of the Yahoo deal.”
But in the wake of that tumultuous September of 2006, Zuckerberg’s stature as a leader soared at Facebook. Many employees even began to view him with a touch of awe. Everyone knew he had been resolute about both News Feed and open registration. Says one senior executive, speaking of Zuckerberg’s response to the News Feed protests, “It was a moment of greatness for Mark. It cemented him as the person who would run this company forever. He looked at his conscience and came up with a great compromise so people could better control the information being shared. That completely silenced everyone, and within a few days the whole thing had blown over.”
And while many of the company’s 130 employees wondered if it made sense to turn down Yahoo—after all, many would have become multimillionaires if Zuckerberg had agreed to sell—the company’s forward progress now started to acquire an air of inevitability. Board member Breyer began to allow himself to envision a much grander Facebook that spanned the entire Internet, a vision he’d resisted in the past. Naomi Gleit, a product manager who had been opposed to News Feed, voices the feelings of others: “He was just two steps ahead of everybody else,” she says. “He had pushed the company, and gotten lots of negative feedback. But he had been right.”
Zuckerberg himself remembers the anxiety of the Yahoo talks. “It was one of the most stressful times,” he says, in an uncharacteristic acknowledgment of his own anxieties. He worried how employees would react when he and the board decided not to sell. “I was really lucky because a lot of times when a company goes through a hard decision like that it can be years until it’s clear that you made the right decision. Whereas in this case it was pretty clear very quickly.”
At one staff meeting during those chaotic weeks, when Facebook’s ability to maintain its momentum seemed so precarious, twenty-two-year-old Mark Zuckerberg showed a candor that both surprised many of his colleagues and endeared them to him. “It may not make you comfortable to hear me saying this,” he said, “but I’m sort of learning on the job here.”
For its holiday party that December, the entire company, now about 150 people, took buses to the Great America Theme Park in nearby Santa Clara. From the minute people got on the buses they started drinking. By the time they arrived at the park many were already drunk. Facebook’s employees celebrated a successful year on the park’s thrill rides that spun, dropped, twisted and inverted them. On the way home an employee threw up in an air vent of one of the buses. The company had to pay several thousand dollars to repair the damage. It was, in a way, Facebook’s last gasp of amateurism. The company had 12 million active users. It had passed the point where it could be run like a dorm-room project.
10
Privacy
“You have one identity.”
How much of ourselves should we show the world? It’s an important question Facebook forces us to confront. Do I want you to know that I am a longtime Fortune magazine journalist who covers technology and is now writing a book about Facebook? Or should I tell you I am a fifty-seven-year-old husband of an artist, father of a teenage girl, sometime poet, and former union activist? Up to now, depending on the social context, I would most likely have presented one or the other of these identities to you. On my single Facebook profile, pretty much all is revealed.
That is no accident. Zuckerberg designed Facebook that way. “You have one identity,” he says emphatically three times in a single minute during a 2009 interview. He recalls that in Facebook’s early days some argued the service ought to offer adult users both a work profile and a “fun social profile.” Zuckerberg was always opposed to that. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly,” he says.
He makes several arguments. “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,” Zuckerberg says moralistically. But he also makes a case he sees as pragmatic—that “the level of transparency the world has now won’t support having two identities for a person.” In other words, even if you want to segregate your personal from your professional information you won’t be able to, as information about you proliferates on the Internet and elsewhere. He would say the same about any images one individual seeks to project—for example, a teenager who acts docile at home but is a drug-using reprobate with his friends.
Zuckerberg, along with a key group of his colleagues, also believes that by openly acknowledging who we are and behaving consistently among all our friends, we will help create a healthier society. In a more “open and transparent” world, people will be held to the consequences of their actions and be more likely to behave responsibly. “To get people to this point where there’s more openness—that’s a big challenge,” says Zuckerberg. “But I think we’ll do it. I just think it will take time. The concept that the world will be better if you share more is something that’s pretty foreign to a lot of people and it runs into all these privacy concerns.”
Most people would find these views discomfiting, and Zuckerberg spends little time dwelling on the obvious downside of his vision. The path to more openness is already strewn with victims whose privacy was unwillingly removed. As one expert in privacy law recently asked, “How many openly gay friends must you have on a social network before you’re outed by implication?” The problems with privacy on Facebook typically arise when the comfortable compartments into which people have segregated various aspects of their lives start to intersect. You may attempt to project one identity for yourself on your Facebook profile, but your friends, through their comments and other actions, may contradict you.
Facebook is founded on a radical social premise—that an inevitable enveloping transparency will overtake modern life. But through strength of conviction, consistency, and strategic flexibility, Zuckerberg has been able to keep Facebook true to this premise despite the pressures that have come as it grows toward 500 million users. To understand Facebook’s history you must understand Zuckerberg’s views about what at Facebook they call “radical transparency.” The company’s most painful moments have come because it took actions—like the launch of News Feed—that suddenly exposed users’ information in unexpected ways.
With its mammoth scale, Facebook’s very success has rendered the premise less alarming. For better or worse, Facebook is causing a mass resetting of the boundaries of personal intimacy. A large number of Facebook’s users, especially younger ones, revel in the fullness of disclosure. Many users willingly fill out extensive details about their career, relationships, interests, and personal history. If you are friends with someone on Facebook, you may learn more about them than you learned in ten years of offline friendship. Zuckerberg considers himself a strong partisan for privacy rights and is proud that Facebook has from the beginning offered users so many controls to determine who sees their information. But he also strongly believes that people are rapidly losing their interest in sequestering their data. So to keep the service in line with what he sees as changing mores, he continues to pust Facebook’s design toward more exposure of information, even as most privacy controls remain in place. This contradiction helps explain the series of privacy-related controversies that have dogged the company throughout its history—around the News Feed in 2006, Beacon in 2007, the terms of service in early 2009, and the “everyone” privacy setting in late 2009. In each case the company pushed its users a bit too hard to expose their data and subsequently had to retreat.
But despite Zuckerberg’s opinion there remain many ways in which social conventions and personal behavior have not yet caught up to Facebook’s uncompromising environment. As it becomes harder to orchestrate how others view us, does that make us more consistent, or just more exposed? Longtime Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly echoes his boss: “We’ve been able to build what we think is a safer, more trusted version of the Internet by holding people to the consequences of their actions and requiring them to use their real identity.” Outside expe
rts take a different view. “At every turn, it seems Facebook makes it more difficult than necessary to protect user privacy,” wrote Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and a respected Internet watchdog, in a mid-2008 op-ed essay. Rotenberg believes that users are not given sufficiently simple controls for their information, and that Facebook for all its belief in transparency is not very transparent about what it does with our information.
The amount of data about us that resides on Facebook also raises public policy questions about privacy. Should this company—or any one company—control and aggregate so much inside its own infrastructure? Should that be a job for government? People want to be in command of their digital identity. Even if Facebook makes promises about how it will treat our data, how can we be certain it will be used as we say it should, not only now but in the future? Facebook makes the personal data provided by users available to advertisers, in aggregated form, for its own commercial gain. It and its business partners learn a lot about us, but in general we know far less about it and exactly how the company is using our data.
Privacy activist Rotenberg certainly thinks so. “Who will control our digital identity over time?” he asks. “We still want control. We don’t want Facebook to control it.” Facebook will certainly face repeated backlash both from users and government regulators as its privacy policy evolves.
The older you are, the more likely you are to find Facebook’s exposure of personal information intrusive and excessive. Many adult users of Facebook have trouble accepting the idea that a single profile should conflate their personal and professional lives. Some of them therefore use it exclusively for genuinely personal information and try to avoid accepting friends from work. Others keep personal stuff to a minimum and connect indiscriminately with work colleagues and contacts, including those they don’t know well, aiming to turn Facebook into a networking bonanza. My Facebook friend Robert Wright, fifty-two, a respected nonfiction author who recently published The Evolution of God, only went on Facebook reluctantly, to help promote his writing. “Facebook requires an amount of disinhibition that is not natural to me. I’m too self-conscious to use modern technology effectively,” he says.
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