Facebook's off-again, on-again affair with privacy

As Mark Zuckerberg filled in the details of his new, privacy-oriented vision of Facebook at the F8 developers conference, he left out a key episode from the past: Long before Facebook's pivot to privacy, the company pivoted to make everything more public. There's a reason Facebook's new "digital living room" where you are "free to be your true self" sounds familiar. You've already been there, if you were one of the hundreds of millions of people who used Facebook before roughly 2010. Facebook's original superpower — and the reason so many users flocked to it from the untamed wilds of the wider web — was that it gave you an assurance of semi-privacy and a respite from the anonymity that fueled so much online conflict. But roughly a decade ago, as the company turned its gaze from user growth to making money, it started deprecating privacy and altering its default settings toward more public interactions. Public pages were more valuable as ad inventory. Privacy, Zuckerberg said in 2010, was no longer a "social norm."