What if the Facebook (Un)Privacy Revolution Is a Good Thing?

“How could Mark Zuckerberg run such an important company like Facebook and be such a screw up?” That’s effectively the question I’ve gotten almost non-stop for the past few weeks. “Is this going to blow up the company?” “Are Zuckerberg’s apologies genuine?” And on and on.

The questions are rooted in this: Facebook revised its privacy settings a few weeks ago and made them mind-numbingly complicated. With so much personal information on their pages, users freaked out. They worried that the default settings were wrong, but that changing them risked making things worse.

Zuckerberg was forced to apologize; and earlier this week, in an effort to calm the furor, Zuckerberg said he was changing Facebook to make its privacy settings easier to use. That perennial question is starting to make the rounds again — Is Zuckerberg, at 26, too young to run such a big company?

The truth is that the events of the past few weeks have been no accident. I’ve interviewed Zuckerberg and/or members of his team more than a dozen times in the last three years, and I believe they all completely understood the company’s new privacy settings would be controversial. Indeed, I think they intended them to be controversial. Look back at the history of Facebook’s privacy firestorms — they happen roughly every 18 months — and you’ll see they all fit the same pattern. In order for Facebook to succeed, it needs to keep challenging existing conventions about online privacy. This isn’t a secret. Zuckerberg has said it many times. What he hasn’t said – but which he and anyone else with a brain knows – is that there is no way to do that without making some users angry.

When Facebook started in 2004, the idea of sharing our name, address and cellphone number — never mind all the other intimate details that show up on our Facebook pages — seemed preposterous. Now nearly 500 million people do it in dozens of different languages, every second of every day. That’s twice the U.S. population, if you take out those younger than about 12, and roughly half the number of people on the Internet.

Why has that happened? Zuckerberg has pushed the world to that place. He has singlehandedly changed the way the world thinks about privacy in the digital age, and I believe the world is a better place because of it.

Call me an apologist if you want. But do that only after you’ve looked at the facts.

Take the Facebook newsfeed. It’s hard to even think about the Facebook experience now without those persistently scrolling updates of your friends’ activities. And yet, when Zuckerberg launched the newsfeed in 2006, his users went berzerk. “How could Facebook just start sending information about me to my friends without my permission?” they asked.

The pressure on Zuckerberg to shut it down was immense. Instead, he told his users to “breathe” and think about whether it was really such a bad thing.

With Beacon, the world went nuts again. Suddenly users’ purchase activity all over the web was being broadcast to their friends. Zuckerberg apologized for that one, too. Users now have more control over who sees what on their Facebook pages. But the principles behind Beacon live on.

Facebook is now generating boatloads of revenues — roughly $2 billion a year based on my sources — because it is successfully marrying its users’ interests with advertisers. It is doing that not just on Facebook’s own site but on sites all over the web.

Last year Facebook found itself embroiled in a controversy surrounding changes to its terms of service and, later in the year, a flap driven by concerns it surreptitiously was forcing users to share too much. But when Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington asked Zuckerberg about the latter issue it in a an onstage interview early this year, he said:  ”Doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing –  to always keep a beginner’s mind and to constantly think about what we would do if we were starting the company now –  and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.” Sound familiar?

Critics would say Zuckerberg’s repeated assaults on user privacy and repeated mea culpas make him the worst kind of scoundrel — someone who apologizes for his actions when what he is really saying is, “If I did anything wrong, then I apologize.” He is not expressing regret as much as annoyance at his inability to get beyond his users’ idiocy.

To me, that just makes him like every other super-successful entrepreneur I know. You don’t change the world by giving people what they say they want, but by giving them something they didn’t know they needed.

Indeed, Zuckerberg’s challenges to conventional thinking about online privacy have become so predictable, it’s starting to resemble Moore’s Law. That bet — that the number of transistors on a silicon chip would double every 18 months — has been the foundation of the computer industry for a generation. Will Facebook’s bet every 18 months that it can push the world to rethink privacy be the driver of the social web? I think so, at least for a while.

There is no doubt that such a posture is risky. As Facebook grows, the line between constantly pushing users to rethink what they share online, and mass defections to another platform gets thinner and thinner. Without those challenges, however, there would be a lot fewer Facebook users — and not much of a business — to worry about losing.

Fred Vogelstein is writing a book about the intersection of media and tech in Silicon Valley. Follow him on Twitter @fvogelstein