Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is having his own privacy invaded in a manner of speaking as a new film is set to release this October that paints the Harvard dropout in a less than flattering light.
Critics say that ‘The Social Network’ portrays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a “borderline-autistic conniver” and a “ruthless and untrustworthy sex maniac” and clearly shows him as part of a small group of misogynistic males who started Facebook by grading female coeds by comparing them to farm animals, added athletes to the online ‘directory’, and then cut out everyone but himself as the application exploded across college campuses everywhere.
The film relays events in a series of flashbacks during a courtroom trial dusting which two former colleagues of Zuckerberg sue him for their stake in the company.
The timing couldn’t be worse for the 26 year old entrepreneur, who is battling criticisms of his social database as hundreds flock to delete accounts before their information is sold. Privacy settings on Facebook are difficult to navigate, many say intentionally, and the wording of Facebook’s TOS exceeds the word count of the Constitution less the amendments.
According to the NYTimes,
The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons. To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options.
PC World comments:
Another simple, for once, page you should pay particular attention to is the Instant Personalization Pilot Program. This is Facebook’s new toy, which lets Facebook — excuse me, you — share your information with third party Web sites. Maybe you feel the need to share everything that’s public about you on Facebook with, say, Microsoft via Microsoft Docs, but I’m not so trusting. Just say no and don’t allow it access.
GIGAom mourns the fact that Facebook could turn this to their advantage but clearly won’t:
Emerging from its current crisis will be painful. Facebook needs to capitulate, if not to its loudest critics, than to the concerns of its everyday users. For most people, 50 different privacy settings is 49 too many. To appeal to the widest audience as possible, default settings need to keep all user data restricted to users’ friends. The challenge to engineers is then to make customizing privacy controls as intuitive and welcoming as possible. The broader challenge for Facebook’s leadership is to entice us into voluntarily offering more personal information to the web at large.
In the meantime, Zuckerberg will have to face up to being portrayed to the world by Hollywood as a drunken, dissipated, skirt-chasing dweeb, who’s girlfriend said when she dumped him that he would:
“go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a tech geek” but “I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”
Ouch. would have been nice to keep that tidbit – well – private…
Tags: Facebook, movie, privacy, zuckerberg
