Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's very public view of privacy

Ten years ago, a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg sat at a computer in his Harvard dorm room and launched thefacebook.com. The goal, according to a 2009 Zuckerberg blog post commemorating Facebook's 200 millionth user, was "to create a richer, faster way for people to share information about what was happening around them".

If you believe the clumsy collegiate dating scenes in the movie The Social Network, however, Zuckerberg's motivation for creating what has become the world's largest social networking platform was, at least in part, to meet girls. He has definitely met the first goal. (He's also reportedly happily married, so the second one seems to have worked out for him, too.)

Today, Facebook has more than one billion active users who, each day, share nearly five billion items, upload 350 million photos and click the "like" button more than 4.5 billion times. Facebook is the world's most popular social networking service and the second-most visited website. Only Google gets more visitors daily.

All that ubiquity challenges how we think about what should be private, and what we broadcast to our "friends" - a term that now includes anyone we happen to remember from high school, that temp job from a few years ago, or last night's party.

With every new product launch, from News Feed to the doomed Beacon advertising play, it seemed Facebook would wait for the inevitable negative reaction on privacy, then announce minimal changes without fundamentally altering the new feature. It would explain away the fuss with careful spin: "We are listening to our users", or We look forward to your feedback". Each time, the Facebook people reassured us all they really want to do is make "the world more open and connected".

In 2011, I found myself at Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters in the US state of California for a gathering of the Future of Privacy Forum, a Washington-based privacy think tank. We met a number of Facebook engineers, advertising managers and public policy executives. All were being asked about privacy concerns, in a room full of privacy advocates, but not one ever uttered the word "privacy" in their responses. Instead, they talked about "user control" or "user options" or promoted the "openness of the platform". It was as if a memo had been circulated instructing them never to use the word "privacy".