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Zuckerburg Urges Users To ‘Trust Facebook’

A lot has been said recently about Facebook’s privacy policies, their databases and the fact that Facebook are second only to the US and UK governments in terms of how much personal information they hold.

With Facebook reaching a mammoth 500 million worldwide users (which, if they were a country, would make them the third largest country in the world in terms of population), concerns have been raised once again about what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg could do with that much personal information in the future.

Zuckerburg responded to those concerns this week, stating that Facebook have no intention of selling off that data.

I just think it would be the stupidest thing we could possibly do. Facebook isn’t a set of information, it’s a community of people who are using Facebook to stay connected and share information. They are only going to do that if they trust us.

It’s understandable why people might be cynical about how Facebook will choose to handle its’ data and address user privacy issues. With such a wealth of information over numerous different demographics all over the world, Zuckerburg must realise just how valuable that information is to marketing executives, large corporations and advertising firms. With the majority of people turning away from traditional advertising in favour of peer recommendations, targeted advertising through a key demographics’ primary communication channel seems like an extremely tempting resource.

We’ll see whether or not Zuckerburg stays true to his word; whilst Facebook continues to be part of the zeitgeist, he’ll probably be very protective of that data and attempt to keep that all important trust from Facebook’s user base. Should that change however, and Facebook’s popularity begins to dwindle, we may well see a different approach from the 26 year old CEO.

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