Mark Zuckerberg and Moore's Law of Privacy

I was at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in London the last 2 days (writeups to follow) and penned this while listening to Ryan Carson interviewing Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. Ryan didn't commit the cardinal sin of flirting with him a la Sarah Lacy, but he did have a fairly easy ride, when compared to the questions some of the people around me at FOWA wanted to ask him (Caroline McCarthy has the near-full story of the interview over here).

There was only one thing I took away from it as a "big delta" and that was the Moore's Law of Privacy.

In essence, Mr Zuckerberg's view is that our resistance to privacy has a half life, and that every say 18 months we are prepared to share twice as much stuff as we did before. He bases this on the behaviour of Facebookers - many come on, share (ie expose) very little, but as time goes by they share more about themselves - and of course there is more to share, as more and more social objects are added.

Which of course all serves up grist to the data mill shining like a Beacon behind the presentation layer on the platform.

Is he right - yes, very probably. Is this acceptable? depends on where you come from - are you interested in ethics, profits or dead sheep?.

Actually, on the Sheep thing, he did note that a lot of those Apps were not really what Facebook wished for going forward. Expect a slaughter of the little lambs that built 'em then

The other thing he said which deserves mention is the Mobile bit - Mike Butcher of Techcrunch notes:

He was also asked about Facebook using location on mobile devices like the iPhone. However, he basically dodged the question.

While he acknowledged that “people are using mobile devices more and more” to update their status and share content into Facebook, he didn’t go any further.

I rather got the impression that mobile wasn't exactly on the critical path - which struck me as odd, given the iPhone, smart Nokias & Blackberry's popularity at the conference - they were the de rigeur Web 2.0 toys for the geekerati...in fact, judging by the number of "real" PC's I saw this year, the Apple Mac shark is well jumped.