Mark Zuckerberg Hides His Friend List
As CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg forced everyone's hidden friend lists into public view. As a user of Google Plus, Mark Zuckerberg just decided to hide his own friends. Double standard, much?
Zuckerberg used to top the rankings of popular Google Plus users. But not any more, because, out of apparent concern for his privacy, he's yanked from public view his list of followers and followees, the Google Plus equivalent of Facebook friends. This makes it impossible to gauge his popularity.
At Facebook, where he's exploiter rather than exploited, Zuck took quite the opposite tack: He actually rewrote the social network's privacy policy a year and a half ago to say "lists of friends... are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings;" millions of hidden friend lists were suddenly exposed. Eventually, after a huge shitstorm, he added some very leaky privacy toggles back in.
Of course, Google executives play by something of a double standard as well. By default, Google Plus makes your friend list public. But the people who run the service don't follow their own suggestion; five of six prominent Googlers tracked by SocialStatistics.com have opted to hide their friends, including social chief Vic Gundotra, CEO Larry Page and co-founder Sergey Brin.
Remember kids: Social networks are never, themselves, the real product—your private information is.
