Facebook founder 'meant' to show private pictures

Speculation was rife this morning that Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had fallen victim to the much criticised privacy changes on his popular social networking site.

Yesterday Digital Journal reported on the furore surrounding the extreme changes in Facebook's privacy settings and following that the world woke today to find that Facebook's own founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had apparently not realised he would have to change his own settings like everyone else. Millions of users around the world were able to view private pictures of Zuckerberg as he holidayed with friends, drank beer, fooled around with his girlfriend and cuddled a teddy-bear. Rather than the usual one picture he normally displays to non-friends they could now see 290 private pictures. However, there was early speculation that, rather than being an oversight on the founders behalf, it was actually a publicity stunt. The Gawker's Ryan Tate writes:

This opening may be a result of Facebook's new default settings; or could be a result of Zuckerberg trying to reverse the PR debacle of the new privacy system by opening up the content himself; or could be a combination of both. In any case, it springs one way or another from the privacy controversy.

Zuckerberg's own Facebook profile has generally always been set at a high privacy level. Kashmir Hill, writing on The Business Insider website, said:

Back in October, I checked the Facebook profiles of the Facebook executive team, and found their privacy settings to be quite high. I wrote of Zuckerberg’s profile at that time:

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO – You can see his photo, his networks (Facebook and Harvard alum), and a list of his 889 friends, but that’s it. You can’t add him as a friend, but you can send him a message.

He then goes on to say:

Well, that’s changed. His profile is now on uber-public settings. I can see his wall, his photo albums, and his events calendar. Zuckerberg recently became a fan of Taylor Swift, uploaded graphic photos of “The Great Goat Roast of 2009″ three months ago, and plans to attend the Facebook holiday party on Friday night. I can even tell you where it’s going to be held.

So did Mark Zuckerberg mean to show his profile content to the world or was it an accident? It seems he meant it. On his Facebook fan page he wrote:

For those wondering, I set most of my content on my personal Facebook page to be open so people could see it. I set some of my content to be more private, but I didn't see a need to limit visibility of pics with my friends, family or my teddy bear :)

However, it seems he might have been a bit hasty in his decision to show his pictures because, while his info and wall pages are still visible, he's returned to what seems like a "friends only" privacy level for his photo albums.

Gemma Fox

Mark Zuckerberg Facebook page screenshot

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