124 Mark Washofsky
norm is just something that's evolved over time... 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. But we view ed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these w ould be the social norms now and we just went for it.” Zuckerberg ’s remarks may suggest that the traditional conception of personal privacy has changed radically in the era of the Internet and social media, and one could possibly infer from them(accurately or not) that he believes that “privacy” is in fact“dead.” But he doesn’t say those exact words. And the fact that the sentiment is widely attributed to him on the Internet 1s, ironically, an example
of the very sort of problem that I refer to here.
(accessed April 12,2011). Schmidt ’s remarks, as quoted:“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it's important, for example that we are all subject in the nited States to the Patriot Act . It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.”(For the interview in which Schmidt made this statement, S http: video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video 1409844721, accessed April 12, 20
Dvorak comments:“For a chief executive to make what amounts to a threat to 1ts
users is absolutely astonishing. The general milquetoast reaction to this threat 1s
even more astounding, but understandable. Our privacy rights have been eroding for years and just accelerated with the Bush administration. President Barack Obama
has been on board since day one.”
9. In the United States , at the time of this writing, these efforts center in a bill sponsored by Senators John Kerry and John McCain and supported by the Obama administration that would create a Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights. The legislation“would force companies to give consumers more control over how their personal information is collected, and possibly sold to third-party outfits. It would also require companies to tell consumers when privacy policies change. And companies would also have to give consumers an easy way to"opt out of having their data collected, and potentially sold”; Steven Gray,“Washington Takes Up Internet Privacy,” Time, April 1 2., 2011, http:/www.time.com/time nation/article/0,8599,2064849,00.html(accessed April 17,2011).