Comment by SoftwareMaven
15 years ago
So at what age are you old enough to be held accountable for what you say? Maybe I'm old-fashioned, living in a world before the term "Emerging Adulthood" was coined and people were expected to be reasonably mature by the time they were old enough to graduate from college.
He deserves EVERY single piece of negative response he gets for those comments. Even then, he was being trusted with people's private information, a trust that he not only disdained, but he openly expressed a desire to abuse.
If that were the only insights into his personality, I'd agree that "context, age, blah, blah, blah", but when taken with everything else about him, it paints a picture of a guy that I would want nothing to do with.
The real question, though, IMO, is whether interacting with Facebook is really having anything to do with Zuck. I wouldn't want to actually have business dealings with FB, but, at this point, to what extent could Zuck "fuck them in the ear" (to use his eloquent phrase)? I think the answer to that is not so much (I do have an account) but enough that I'm not going to go overboard (minimal status updates; photos are backed up not stored on FB; no use of places or likes; etc).
I'm inclined to agree with you regarding accountability. But, I dunno, I really don't want my company or business ethics judged by stuff I said to friends in college... through IM. People say stupid stuff all the time.
If it were just generic stuff, I would completely agree. I say stupid stuff to my friends now.
However, he was talking about his customers, the people using his service. That gives much less leniency, in my book, especially when everything else is taken into account.
I guess I see it much the same as I'd see an investment advisor who open talked about screwing his customers out of their money. FB's financial value comes from the data that Zuck is talking about screwing people with.
Customers? I don't think anyone saw Facebook then as they see it today.
I agree. It's amazing how much I have to police my coworkers not to say the wrong thing, but I don't consider them evil. They say stuff, but they are just joking around. Sometimes I must seem to be a PC prude to them.
"They say stuff, but they are just joking around."
I've found that jokes often reveal a lot about what people actually believe.
Seriously: NEWS FLASH ZUCKERBERG IS KIND OF A DOUCHE
I mean.. maybe if you didn't know that, this will alert you to it, and welcome to the internet. They're Facebook, we don't need to go easy on him.
You know, I agree with you completely. This thread is rather depressing, a lot of people saying "it's not a big deal, he was young, etc". This is an ethically-challenged 19 year old who is boasting too much. It is a big deal (anyone remember Jeffrey Skilling of Enron, there are some non-trivial similarities between Zuckerberg and Skilling when he was young).