Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, has always talked about making the world a more open place, by connecting people together and sharing information about them. Then again, Facebook was created with an intention to provide people to share information among private groups, without strangers being able to bother them. Isn’t this a conflicting matter? From the very start, Facebook’s intentions have been very shady and unclear, and Zuckerberg’s team hasn’t done a very neat job in convincing the users that they care about their privacy. On one hand, Facebook has been going on and on about connecting people by giving them tools to reach out to their friends, while on the other hand, Facebook has been shamelessly selling users’ private data to advertisers in an attempt to create targeted ads and generate more revenue.

Mark Zuckerberg is known to have used unethical means in creating the very first version of  Facebook, then known as Facemash. He is indeed a genius for having managed to do all this in a drunken rage, but it still remains a fact that he is a person who clearly does not care a lot about others. He puts his interests ahead of people’s privacy, and this has been proved on multiple occasions. Behind all his talk of making the world a more open place, what Mr.Zuckerberg really sees is a bloated user-base full of rich information that can be harvested to generate ad revenue.  In the beginning Facebook was merely an exciting project that was intended to connect people with similar interests online. It was an excellent platform to make friends and create communities. But once Zuckerberg realized that the site was growing at an exponential rate, he began to look for ways to make the most money out of it, and started serving ads, just like any other website owner would do.

It would have been well and good if these ads were harmless. But they are nothing but a means of using the users’ private information and selling it to their friends! Most people click on these ads just because they see that some of their friends have recommended them. In other cases, some people were horrified to find out that their profile pictures were used without their permission on dating ads. Such incidents have come down recently, but it just shows how easily Facebook will part with its users’ private information.

Mark Zuckerberg has no right to talk about an open world, because he himself has stayed away from the world, isolated in his Harvard dormitory. Even today, he thinks twice before speaking for long in public. Such a person cannot be trusted to safeguard the information of 500 million people worldwide. An open world may or may not be possible, as some people are adverse to the idea of sharing everything about themselves. Facebook is not the only medium which can make an open world possible, nor is it the only place in the world to make and meet friends!