Mark Zuckerberg talking with Michael Arrington about the recent change in default privacy settings on Facebook:

When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’

And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that’s 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.

So now, a lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the type of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and think: what would we do if we were starting the company now, and starting the site now, and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

The recent policy change that he’s speaking of was quite a shocker to anyone who paid attention to it. If you were a Facebook user that hadn’t changed any of their privacy settings, when you were prompted regarding the new privacy settings, Facebook would default to letting everyone view your photos, status updates, friends, groups, etc..

I completely deleted my Facebook account a few months ago and am happy I did. I don’t want any part in a website that treats my personal information so carelessly.

Facebook allows you to “deactivate” your account but they make it a little more difficult to permanently delete your account. To permanently delete your account visit: “http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account”

(Via Valleywag.)