Ahead of the October release of a film about the rise of Facebook, the New Yorker has run a profile of the social networking site’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
The profile comes at Zuckerberg through his Facebook profile noting that he “cites ‘Minimalism’, ‘Revolutions’, and ‘Eliminating Desire’ as interests.” Zuckerberg (or Zuck) isn’t too happy about being the subject of Aaron Sorkin’s film, The Social Network. He doesn’t think he’ll see the movie and when pressed on what it will mean to his public persona he only answered “I know the real story.” Perhaps most damningly Zuckerberg removed The West Wing (Sorkin’s best-known TV series) from his Facebook profile.
And then there’s the privacy incident of December 2009 where Facebook made many users' details public unless they could sort out some complicated settings. The profile features IM (Instant Messenger) exchanges that Zuckerberg had while coming up with Facebook including his offer to a fellow hacker that he’d give out email addresses, pictures and other information he’d gathered on his fellow Harvard students. When asked why he thought people trusted him with their details he sarcastically replied “they ‘trust me’”.
Zuckerberg explains that privacy isn’t Facebook’s concern and many of the changes were about making Facebook profitable. Zuckeberg defends the changes by saying, “We realize that people will probably criticize us for this for a long time, but we just believe that this is the right thing to do.”