Mark Zuckerberg: if I set up Facebook now I wouldn't choose Silicon Valley

'Silicon Valley is a little short-term focused and that bothers me,' says founder of social networking site

Mark Zuckerberg knows that this time next year Facebook will be a public company, or preparing itself for a blockbuster public offering.
In a rare interview this weekend, the 27-year-old founder of the social networking site spoke candidly about culture, commitment and clingers-on at Silicon Valley's hottest ticket.
Most interestingly, Zuckerberg said he would have bypassed the Valley if he were that 21-year-old Harvard student starting Facebook tomorrow. "If I were starting now I would do things very differently," he told Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingstone in the interview.
"I didn't know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it's not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me."
It was here that Young Zuck got nostalgic. Harking back to the sophomore summer of 2004 when he moved into that house in the Valley, Zuckerberg dismissed The Social Network's portrait of it as a party den beset with booze and attractive Californians, but added that Facebook was only months away from feeling like a proper company.
"It was not like in the movie, there was no drinking. We all just lived in a house, iterated, kept going," he said. "It wasn't until we got our first office in Palo Alto that things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company."
You get the impression that the next 12 months for Zuckerberg are going to be a specific form of hell. Before the end of this year, he will shift the company's entire Palo Alto operation – currently split between two offices, one for developers and another for the corporate types – to one huge campus in nearby Menlo Park. In April, Facebook will be forced by regulators to report its first set of financials, and within months Zuckerberg will be off to tout the company around Wall Street. And if the reports are accurate, Facebook will go public with a value of about $70bn before the end of 2012. That's some big corporate change.
What does Zuckerberg make of all this? "If you go through some big corporate change, it's just not going to be the same," he told Livingstone, referring to the rejected Yahoo bid in 2006. "If we sold to Yahoo, they would have done something different, if you want to continue your vision of the company, then don't sell because there's inevitably going to be some change."

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Facebook could face €100,000 fine for holding data that users have deleted

Social network will be audited by Irish data protection commissioner after Austrian law student registers 22 complaints

Facebook could face a fine of up to €100,000 (£87,000) after an Austrian law student discovered the social networking site held 1,200 pages of personal data about him, much of which he had deleted.
Max Schrems, 24, decided to ask Facebook for a copy of his data in June after attending a lecture by a Facebook executive while on an exchange programme at Santa Clara University in California.
Schrems was shocked when he eventually received a CD from California containing messages and information he says he had deleted from his profile in the three years since he joined the site.
After receiving the data, Schrems decided to log a list of 22 separate complaints with the Irish data protection commissioner, which next week is to carry out its first audit of Facebook. He wrote to Ireland after discovering that European users are administered by the Irish Facebook subsidiary. A spokeswoman for the commissioner confirmed its officers would be investigating alleged breaches raised by Schrems as part of the audit. If the commissioner decides to prosecute and Facebook or any employees are found guilty of data protection breaches, the maximum penalty is a fine of €100,000.
Among the 1,200 pages of data Schrems was sent were rejected friend requests, incidences where he "defriended" someone, as well as a log of all Facebook chats he had ever had. There was also a list of photos he had detagged of himself, the names of everyone he had ever "poked", which events he had attended, which he hadn't replied to, and much more besides.
The information was broken down into 57 categories, including likes, log-ons (a list of when he logged on and which IP address he used) and emails, which included some email addresses Schrems had never personally uploaded to the site but which he assumes were discerned from another user's profile.
"I discovered Facebook had kept highly personal messages I had written and then deleted, which, were they to become public, could be highly damaging to my reputation," said Schrems in an interview between law lectures on Thursday.
"I'm not saying there was anything criminal or forbidden there, but let's just say that, as someone wanting to work in law, there was stuff which could make it pretty impossible for me to get a job." By holding on to data its users assumed was deleted, Facebook was acting like "the KGB or the CIA", said Schrems.
"Information is power, and information about people is power over people. It's frightening that all this data is being held by Facebook.
"Of course, they are not misusing it at the moment, but the biggest concern is what happens when there is a privacy breach, either from hackers or from someone inside the firm?"
A spokesman for Facebook said in a statement: "Facebook provided Mr Schrems with all of the information required in response to his request.
"It included requests for information on a range of other things that are not personal information, including Facebook's proprietary fraud protection measures, and 'any other analytical procedure that Facebook runs'.
"This is clearly not personal data, and Irish data protection law rightly places some valuable and reasonable limits on the data that has to be provided."
Facebook says any user can download their "personal archive".
But Schrems, on the campaigning website he has set up to encourage others to follow his lead, claims that: "This tool only offers access to a fraction of the data Facebook holds.
"It even falls short of providing the amount of data we already received from Facebook."
Facebook later said: "As part of offering people messaging services, we enable people to delete messages they receive from their inbox and messages they send from their sent folder.
"However, people can't delete a message they send from the recipient's inbox or a message you receive from the sender's sent folder. This is the way every message service ever invented works.
"We think it's also consistent with people's expectations. We look forward to making these and other clarifications to the Irish DPA."
• This article was updated on Friday 21 October to take in the second response from Facebook

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Web Firms' Data Proves Irresistible to Law Enforcers

Internet companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook are increasingly co-opted for surveillance work as the information they gather proves irresistible to law enforcement agencies, web experts have said.
Although such companies try to keep their users' information private, their business models depend on exploiting it to sell targeted advertising, and when governments demand they hand it over, they have little choice but to comply.
Suggestions that BlackBerry maker RIM might give user data to British police after its messenger service was used to coordinate riots this summer caused outrage - as has the spying on social media users by more oppressive governments.
But the vast amount of personal information that companies like Google collect to run their businesses run has become simply too valuable for police and governments to ignore, delegates to the Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi said.
"When the possibility exists for information to be obtained that wasn't possible before, it's entirely understandable that law enforcement is interested," Google's chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf said in an interview.
"Then the issue would be, what's the right policy? And that, or course, engenders a lot of debate," said Cerf, who is recognised as one of the "fathers of the internet" for his early work in areas including communications protocols and email.
Demands from governments for internet companies to hand over user information have become routine, according to online privacy researcher and activist Christopher Soghoian, who makes extensive use of freedom-of-information requests in his work.
"Every decent-sized US telecoms and internet company has a team that does nothing but respond to requests for information," Soghoian said in an interview.
Soghoian estimates that US internet and telecoms companies may receive about 300,000 such requests in connection with law enforcement each year - but public information is scarce.
While US courts are obliged to publish reports on wire-tapping of telephone lines, no similar information is required to be made public with respect to the internet - which grew up after the laws on electronic communications were passed.
Google does voluntarily publish a transparency report every six months in which it details the number of requests it receives from governments around the world to remove content from its services or hand over user data. But the numbers do not reveal how many users are affected by each request - only trends country by country.
Some governments are requiring internet companies to collect more data and keep it for longer, said Katarzyna Szymielewicz, executive director of Poland's Panoptykon Foundation, which campaigns for human rights in light of modern surveillance.
"Government agencies throughout the world are pushing companies to collect even more data than is needed for their business purposes," she told the conference.
"For example, we have a very controversial data retention regime which is currently under review. This requires people to store data for a period up to two years so it can easily be accessed by law enforcement agencies."
The ease and cost of surveillance are at an all-time low, Soghoian said, with Google charging an administrative fee of $US25 to hand over data, Yahoo charging $US20, and Microsoft and Facebook providing data for free.
"Now, one police officer from the comfort of their desk can track 20, 30, 50 people all through web interfaces provided by mobile companies and cloud computing companies," he said.
"The marginal cost of surveilling one more person is now essentially approaching zero."

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Facebook to be investigated over privacy concerns

Irish privacy regulator to audit how social network handles users' data in Europe as the US Federal Trade Commission also considers probe

Facebook is to be investigated by the Irish privacy regulator into how it handles users' data across Europe.
In the next fortnight the Irish data protection commissioner will launch a wide-ranging privacy audit of the social network after complaints about how Facebook tracks its users online.
The Irish regulator will conduct the audit on behalf of authorities in 27 European states, including the UK. The commissioner expects to complete the report before the end of the year, a spokeswoman for the regulator said.
Facebook is also under pressure in the US, where the Federal Trade Commission is considering an investigation into the popular website following complaints from a coalition of privacy campaigners.
The social network is under the spotlight after changes made last week to how Facebook stores information about its 800 million global users.
On Wednesday, Facebook hastily fixed an issue that meant its users were being tracked even when they left the network. Facebook has consistently argued that it did not store the information.
A spokeswoman for the Irish data protection commissioner said on Friday the Facebook probe would be its "most intensive" to date, due to its popularity.
The Irish regulator launched the investigation after it received 22 separate complaints from the online watchdog Europe versus Facebook. The group first lodged complaints with the commissioner about Facebook on 18 August, with the latest filed on 19 September.
Most of the complaints focus on how Facebook stores information about its users, including allegations that it does not delete information which it says has been removed and its use of facial recognition technology to tag users' photographs.
Facebook says the issue about deleted information most likely relates to users' removing a post from a part of the social network without fully deleting it, adding that facial-recognition software can be switched off in the privacy settings.
Investigators from the commissioner's office will conduct the audit at Facebook's Dublin premises in mid-October. Facebook employs 300 people in the Irish capital.
A spokeswoman for Facebook said: "Facebook's European headquarters in Ireland manages the company's compliance with EU data protection law. We are in regular dialogue with the Irish data protection commissioner and we look forward to demonstrating our commitment to the appropriate handling of user data as part of this routine audit."
On Thursday, users of the online forum Reddit flooded Facebook with requests to send out hard copies of personal data it holds on its users. The campaign followed complaints from users of Spotify and other media websites that everything they watched and listened to online was being automatically shared on the social network.
Facebook users have to opt-in to the automatic sharing function, but some have found it overbearing.
Spotify introduced a "private listening" feature on Thursday, in response to users who complained that they didn't want Facebook friends being notified of every song they listened to.

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