Zuckerberg's History of Apologies, and the Confidence of Robin Li and His Peers

People keep putting more of their information onto social networks, and tech companies keep pushing out the line where privacy ends. You never notice.

Facebook went to the U.S. Congress to apologize.

On the afternoon of April 10, Eastern Time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced congressional questioning in Washington. The whole hearing was livestreamed on video.

An Associated Press photographer caught the notes lying in front of Zuckerberg. Among the notes his aides had prepared was a question like "Are you ready to resign?" The suggested answer: he had indeed made mistakes, the company was facing enormous challenges, and it would work through them too. So far, no senator has actually asked it.

They had more pressing questions for Zuckerberg to answer.

Through the whole hearing, Zuckerberg apologized again and again for the trouble Facebook had run into, while senators fired off one sharp question after another. What was Facebook doing to keep Russia from interfering in another election? Could users really delete for good the information they had left on Facebook? How long did Facebook keep that information on its servers? One senator even brought up the app used in Obama's campaign.

Before the senators began questioning him in earnest, Zuckerberg read out a prepared statement of nearly 3,000 words. It followed the same pattern as the apology he had posted on Facebook: apologize, explain what happened, then describe what Facebook would change — for instance, limiting the data a developer could reach if a user hadn't opened the app in three months.

"We haven't done enough to prevent Facebook from being used as a tool. There have been problems like fake news, foreign interference in the presidential election, hate speech, and data privacy," Zuckerberg said. "In the past, we didn't take enough responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It's my mistake, and I'm sorry. I started Facebook, and I'm responsible for what happens on the platform."

This was Zuckerberg's first appearance before Congress. He sat in the witness chair for a full five and a half hours.

China's internet giants have never been through anything like it — grilled over and over about privacy at a hearing broadcast live to the public.

From Xiaonei, QQ Zone, and Weibo to WeChat, China's social networking products all carry, to varying degrees, the marks of copying Facebook.

Every time Facebook shipped a feature that put more of a user's private life on display, it met resistance, and Zuckerberg apologized in public and reassured users. The outcome was always the same: users gave ground and accepted the new arrangement — personal information on a social network, a homepage feed that gathers up friends' updates, social-network data shared with advertisers. These features, standard on every social network today, took shape at Facebook through one apology after another.

The internet as we know it rests on a bargain: hand over your real information, and you can search and share freely in the digital world.

For Facebook, striking that bargain has taken years of hard work. Its counterparts in China have met almost no resistance at all.

Baidu CEO Robin Li said recently at the 2018 China Development Forum: "Chinese people are more open about privacy, or perhaps less sensitive about it. If they can trade privacy for convenience or efficiency, in many cases they're willing to do that."

This wasn't a stray thought of Li's. It was the reality Chinese internet companies had grown used to over many years.

South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham had printed out Facebook's user agreement and kept it at his elbow. His question: "Most people don't read the user agreement, do they?"

The answer is yes.

And Facebook is hardly alone — internet companies take all sorts of rights and permissions from users on the strength of a catch-all agreement nobody can get through.

Some of the senators' questions were ones Facebook had already answered many times over the past two weeks. The apology Zuckerberg posted in late March followed Facebook's standing template for a fierce user backlash.

First, a detailed account of what happened and how Facebook let the loophole be exploited in the first place. Then, what Facebook would do to keep it from happening again.

In the more than a decade since Facebook was founded, Zuckerberg has apologized more times than anyone can count.

In the past, users soon forgot what they had been angry about, while the feature that angered them stayed on Facebook, and over time they simply got used to it.

This time, the outcry over Cambridge Analytica's misuse of Facebook user data — tangled up as it was with the U.S. presidential election — became the country's hottest topic for two weeks. Facebook's stock briefly lost tens of billions of dollars in market value, and calls to delete Facebook spread and grew louder on other social networks.

Senator Bill Nelson, who chaired the questioning, said at the outset: "If Facebook and other social media companies don't play by the rules, none of our privacy will survive."

Decades of pent-up user resentment went off at once.

From Facebook to Xiaonei: People Start Putting Real Information on Social Networks

A year before Facebook was founded, Zuckerberg, then still a Harvard student, had already had one round of practice at apologizing in public.

He built a site called Facemash that automatically pulled Harvard students' photos off the school's local network and laid them out so visitors could rate who was more attractive ("hot"). It caused an uproar on campus.

In his apology letter, Zuckerberg wrote: "I'm sorry that in trying to make the site grow and spread quickly, I caused this outcome. I now know I used the wrong methods to reach my goal."

Everyone knows what happened next: Zuckerberg rode out that storm and founded Facebook.

This time, people uploaded their information to Facebook of their own accord.

Or, more precisely: the term "social network" was Facebook's invention.

When you signed up for a Facebook account, you had to upload a photo of yourself and hand over all kinds of personal information: name, age, occupation, education. On the profile page Facebook generated for you, "who you are" was laid out in plain view. Beyond that, you would display your likes and dislikes, your contact details, your location. Facebook then strung all these individual pages into a network.

People didn't really understand digital socializing then, and certainly had no idea of privacy online. The birth of the social network redefined where privacy ends.

It wasn't only a few well-known investors who couldn't see why anyone would want such a thing and missed their chance — Zuckerberg didn't know why either, at the time.

Private conversations from Zuckerberg's own computer were obtained and published by the tech site Silicon Alley Insider. Six years later he had to apologize again for what he had written.

He was just a college student then, and he didn't watch his words. In a conversation with a friend, he said: "Those people just gave me their data. I don't even know why. They 'trust me.' Dumb fucks."

Without any effort, he could see the email addresses and photos of more than 4,000 Harvard students through Facebook — all of it uploaded by the users themselves and displayed on their own pages.

Some Chinese companies saw Facebook and copied it into China.

Xiaonei, founded by Wang Xing, was one. It launched at the end of 2005. Like Facebook starting out at Harvard, Xiaonei began at Tsinghua, Peking University, and Renmin University. Students registered under their real names, added their classmates on the site, and put their lives on display there.

Around the same time Xiaonei was founded, a wave of Facebook copies appeared in China: Zhanzuo, Lulian, Yiju, 5Q, ChinaY.com, Dorm 99, Dipian, and Baodu, among others.

From college students to office workers, hundreds of millions of people signed up for these real-name social networks.

Facebook Launched the News Feed, and QQ Zone Was the First to Copy It

In September 2006, Facebook launched News Feed and Mini-Feed. Before that, Facebook had only user profile pages; people were used to posting updates to record their own lives, then clicking into a friend's page now and then to see what they had posted.

Seen through today's eyes, Facebook back then was a bit like WeChat without Moments.

The News Feed broke all that. Overnight, people found their updates folded into a stream, mixed in with their friends' updates, easy to scroll with a swipe. The new feature unsettled a great many privacy-conscious users, and more than a million of them joined protest groups.

An old friend of Chris Cox, the engineer who led the News Feed's development, told him: "You just ruined the thing I care about most. Please shut it down."

On September 5, Zuckerberg posted a long note on his own Facebook account titled Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.

He made three points. "First, the News Feed is a 'young' new product that still needs work, and Facebook values your feedback. Second, we don't want anyone to feel 'stalked' — we just want to make it easier to stay close to friends, because everything worth recording is worth sharing. Finally, the privacy settings are still there: you can make things visible only to yourself or only to friends. Anything you don't want seen will not be seen."

The protesters outside Facebook's door gradually dispersed, and over that same stretch Facebook's user count doubled.

In the decade-plus that followed, Facebook kept the News Feed, and the protests about invading privacy died away. The complaints that remained were mostly about seeing something they shouldn't have, or missing something that mattered. By reworking its algorithm and pushing content by interest, Facebook got more and more people used to the feature.

On the News Feed's tenth anniversary, Zuckerberg said: "News Feed is one of the biggest bets we've made in the past 10 years, and it's helped shape our community and almost the entire internet."

On the other side of the world, a year after the News Feed launched, Facebook's imitators in the East went to work. QQ Zone built an "information center" on its homepage, but Tencent's team, having learned from Zuckerberg's lesson, took a smaller step.

"We were worried users wouldn't be used to it, so we put the feed of friends' status updates on a secondary page. But it turned out users liked it," recalled Liang Zhu, Tencent vice president and general manager of the Social Platform Group.

After that, QQ Zone gradually made the feed the centerpiece of its homepage — the "personal center" you see the moment you log into QQ Zone today. That year, Tencent disclosed QQ Zone's active user count in its earnings report for the first time: 102 million.

On April 19, 2012, WeChat released version 4.0, and Moments launched. Longtime QQ users took to it with ease. Drawing on his understanding of how Chinese people socialize with people they already know, Allen Zhang made this feed a little cleaner and a little more private. By the end of 2017, WeChat had 963 million users.

Logging Into Other Apps With a Social Account: WeChat Now Does It Most Widely

That same year, though, Facebook's users felt Zuckerberg step on their toes again. Some hadn't even heard of a thing called Beacon before it broadcast their whereabouts for no clear reason.

Beacon was born in November 2007 and died in September 2009. It was an advertising system built by Facebook that, at the start, shared a user's activity on the web with their friends automatically. When a Facebook user bought something on Overstock.com, for example, their friends could learn about the purchase from their Facebook page.

For the third-party businesses working with Facebook, this was natural, effortless advertising. For users who woke up the next morning, scrolled the feed, and discovered that everyone now knew what they had bought, it did not feel good.

The backlash against Beacon started quickly. Facebook's explanation took a month to arrive.

In its apology, Facebook said Beacon had given away users' activity without their knowledge because "we wanted to make sharing easier."

Beacon's troubles were far from over. Some advertisers who had backed the system, Coca-Cola among them, pulled out.

A year later, Facebook shut down the Beacon ad system entirely and paid $9.5 million in a settlement to set up a foundation promoting privacy protection online. That closed the chapter at last. To this day, Beacon is still counted among the most conspicuous failures of Facebook's early years.

For Facebook's imitators in the East, though, this failure was not without use. In 2016, Dianping and Meituan wired in WeChat's social system — only their fate turned out to be very different from Facebook's.

Log into Dianping with your WeChat account and, right in the middle of the Dianping homepage, you'll find your WeChat friends' recent reviews and check-ins. On Meituan's food-delivery app, you can likewise see the orders your friends recently gave five stars.

Beacon brought Facebook enormous trouble. At Dianping and Meituan, bringing in social connections was also an important move to lift user engagement — the difference is that they ran into hardly any resistance.

Many people never realized that where they eat had already been shared with their WeChat friends.

Users' Information on Facebook Was Shared With Advertisers — By Now You're Probably Used to It

In 2010, Zuckerberg apologized again.

Wall Street Journal reporters found that Facebook and some other social networking sites were sharing user information with advertisers, who could obtain personal details such as users' names.

That, too, sent a wave of users to delete their Facebook accounts in protest.

But this sort of thing was already common on China's internet. "Connecting and sharing user data" was standard language when companies announced a partnership — meaning the trail you left on site A could be picked up by company B to analyze and to aim ads.

Weibo and Baidu both did it. Something you searched for on Weibo would soon turn up in your recommendations on Taobao.

Sometimes something you searched for on JD.com showed up in a Baidu ad. Or something you looked at on Taobao but didn't buy appeared in your Weibo recommendations, which came as a small surprise.

If you were at dinner with a friend, mentioned yogurt, and a Walmart clerk walked up on your way out and said, "I hear you want to buy yogurt, we have some right here…" — it would scare quite a few people. On the internet this happens every second, and we are used to it.

Digital life keeps getting more convenient, and in a way that looks absurd yet makes its own sense, it keeps changing what we think about our rights and about the use of our privacy.

Facebook's Latest Crisis Is Years of Pent-Up Resentment Over Privacy, Finally Erupting

At the start of 2018, publishing his New Year's resolution, Zuckerberg said this year at Facebook felt a bit like the period right after the 2009 financial crisis: the company faced a whole series of problems to solve.

He said the first job was to make sure Facebook wasn't subject to interference from foreign actors, and to crack down on inflammatory, hateful speech, so users would have a comfortable place to socialize.

Starting in the second half of last year, Facebook had run into a string of problems: fake news, algorithms swaying elections, and most recently the Cambridge Analytica affair.

Facebook's business model depends on user information.

At this hearing, some senators also brought up Obama's campaign. Obama's win owed something to Facebook. The Obama team's deep mining of voter data relied on Facebook too — the difference being that Obama's app said plainly that the information would be used for campaign analysis.

But once the subject becomes "how Americans put Trump in office," the matter can't be small. And in a controversy this fierce, no one from Facebook's leadership had stepped forward, which drew another round of criticism.

Last September, Facebook admitted in a report to the U.S. congressional intelligence committee that during the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives had interfered in the vote by secretly buying political ads on the platform. An investigative report Facebook released showed that 500 fake accounts "possibly operated by Russia" had bought ad placements on the platform during last year's U.S. election to interfere with the presidential race.

With Facebook consumed by this latest privacy crisis, its apology failed to quiet the doubts this time. Meanwhile, in China's internet environment, privacy still wasn't a big deal.

As early as 2014, Robin Li had discussed privacy in public. He said: "Privacy is a topic the media is especially interested in, and internet companies are especially uninterested in."

"A lot of people feel that because there's so much of my data, and it's held by these big internet companies, my privacy has been violated," Li said. That's not how it works, he argued: "These internet companies are really just a pile of servers. Nobody actually pulls your data out and looks closely at what one particular person is doing. That's exactly why, as Jack Ma put it, he might be able to know what I bought, but he isn't going to go look."

And in the first years after social networks appeared in China, these internet giants never discussed privacy in public at all.

Because nobody asked.

As Long as You Can't Leave Social Networks, the Boundary of Privacy Won't Stop Here

The first time Zuckerberg was stumped at the hearing was when Senator Orrin Hatch asked: "How do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service?"

After a slightly awkward pause, Zuckerberg replied: "Senator, we run ads."

Users get the service free and hand their personal information to internet companies, which use that information and those habits to sell ads. It is the most common business model on the internet.

Some have suggested Facebook should pick a harmless business model: lean less on advertising, lean more on subscriptions. The trouble is, why would it give up such a profitable ad business?

Today, for search engines and social networks alike, advertising is the main source of revenue.

A social network can sell ads so well because users chose this model: users choose a free social network → the social network collects data and sells ads for advertisers → the social network offers more features → users hand over more information → the social network collects more data and aims advertisers' ads more precisely.

One senator asked whether users could pay to get a service without ads. Zuckerberg replied that people dislike ads only because the ads aren't relevant to them. Facebook has no paid, ad-free option.

Facebook's $470 billion market value cannot be held up by users paying to remove ads.

For free service and convenience, users have given up one right and one piece of privacy after another.

Which parts of your privacy should be out of reach for internet companies? That territory keeps changing — and however it changes, it keeps shrinking.

"Who is Facebook's biggest competitor? If I don't want to use Facebook, what other social network can I use?" The question came again from Senator Graham, the one with the printed-out user agreement at his elbow.

Zuckerberg couldn't produce much of an answer.

Graham pressed on: "Is Facebook a monopoly?"

"It doesn't feel like that to me," Zuckerberg replied.

Ship the feature first, apologize when people notice: over the years, through one apology after another, this social network spanning the globe has completely redrawn where people believe digital privacy ends.

Was Facebook a victim of this affair? The question came about two-thirds of the way through the hearing. Zuckerberg said no — the 87 million affected users were the victims.

"They didn't want their information sold to Cambridge Analytica by a developer. Even though Facebook didn't do this itself, we're responsible for stopping things like this from happening, and for acting sooner," he said.

But the harm was already done.

On the morning of April 11, local U.S. time, another hearing was waiting for Facebook and Zuckerberg.

The likeliest outcome of the Cambridge Analytica affair is that internet companies, rattled by the episode, will accept a few new rules and put more effort into transparency. Congress will hold further hearings on the matter.

Facebook is still one of the largest tech companies on Earth. China's biggest tech companies, meanwhile, have yet to face a real challenge over user privacy.

The public's indifference to privacy has given them confidence, and will keep giving them confidence for years to come.

Cover image from VisualHunt and Visual China Group