Social networking sites herald end of privacy: Commentators

When the social networking site Facebook was launched, user privacy was something of an article of faith with the company.

Increasingly, it is no big deal now and Facebook founder Marck Zuckerberg said as much, in a way, when he told a live audience in January this year that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was with the company till it effected an about turn in December last year.

Zuckerberg was then in an onstage conversation with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. In roughly 8 sentences in a six-minute interview Zuckerberg said in the last five or six years, blogging had taken off in a huge way and people were getting increasingly comfortable with sharing more information more openly and with more people.

He added that the social norm was something that had evolved over time.

"We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do.