Mark Zuckerberg’s 2006 ‘Book of Change’
Check out this great piece on Mark Zuckerberg by Steven Levy, writing for WIRED.
In the early days of Facebook, Zuck kept his plans for world domination in handwritten journals. He destroyed them. But a few revealing pages survived.
Much of Levy’s piece was informed by what Zuckerberg wrote in those journals, as well as interviews with Zuckerberg himself and other Facebook executives. The pattern of corporate irresponsibility and depravity we’ve seen from Facebook recently has been there since the very beginning.
What distinguished Facebook from other social networks was the assumed privacy provided by its gated setup [when Facebook was only available to college students]. Open Reg[istration] would throw open those gates to the masses. But would people then no longer see Facebook as a safe space? In designing Open Reg, he posted one final question to himself.
“What makes this seem secure, whether or not it actually is?” He seemed at least as concerned about the perception of privacy as with privacy itself.
”What makes this seem secure, whether or not it actually is?” Incredible.
Using Facebook needs to feel like you're using a futuristic government-style interface to access a database full of information linked to every person. The user needs to be able to look at information at any depth … The user experience needs to feel “full.” That is, when you click on a person in a governmental database, there is always information about them.
A government-esque catalog of every person in the world. Charming. But not everyone would sign up for Facebook, so this wasn’t achievable. Not to fear, Zuckerberg had a plan.
He took three pages to lay out a vision for something he called “Dark Profiles.” These would be Facebook pages for people who, whether by omission or intention, had not signed up for Facebook. […]
Zuckerberg was aware that allowing the creation of profiles for people who had no desire to be on Facebook might stir up privacy concerns. He spent some time pondering how this could avoid being “creepy.” Maybe, he mused, dark accounts might not be included in search engines.
Shadow profiles are not a joke, they’ve been a part of Facebook’s plan from the very early days.
There will be a tipping point for Facebook. One after another, the curtains are being pulled back and what we’re finding is that the people behind Facebook have always been immeasurably negligent and downright disrespectful of their users. Hopefully, stories like this will move public opinion against Facebook sooner than later, and embolden people to delete their profiles.