Facebook’s Privacy Puzzle

In his book The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, David Kirkpatrick describes how when Mark Zuckerberg was beginning to build his social-networking business, he would sit around on weekends and read the works of Peter Drucker. Now, it seems, would be a pretty good time for Zuckerberg to make sure he and his entire team brush up on Drucker’s teachings about the customer.

In particular, the folks at Facebook would do well to consider Drucker’s notions about how to juggle the needs of primary customers (in Face-book’s case, its 500 million users, who have certain expectations when it comes to privacy) and supporting customers (the company’s advertisers, who are eager to access and exploit as much customer data as possible).