Facebook founder’s anti-privacy sister changes tune after personal photo goes viral

Once again, I couldn’t be happier that I shut down my Facebook account so many years ago.Randi Zuckerberg — sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who used to be the marketing director of the company — had previously said that online anonymity “has to go away”:

“I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away… People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. … I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.”

Yeah, nice idea in theory.  But in practice, not so much.  Here’s what happened the other day when Zuckerberg, the sister, posted a photo to Facebook:

A picture that Zuckerberg’s sister posted on her personal Facebook profile was seen by a marketing director, who then posted the picture to Twitter and her more than 40,000 followers Wednesday.
That didn’t sit well with Zuckerberg’s sister, Randi, who tweeted at Callie Schweitzer that the picture was meant for friends only and that posting the private picture on Twitter was “way uncool.” Schweitzer replied by saying the picture popped up on her Facebook news feed.

It’s hard to miss the irony – Facebook’s property, Instagram, caused a big blow up last week by announcing that it was going to own every photo that users posted on the app/network, and would sell the photos to advertisers without your knowledge.  Sell your Instagram photo to advertisers without your knowledge or permission, okay – post your photo to Facebook photo to Twitter, oh the horror!  And it’s all the more ironic with Facebook’s long history of privacy controversies.
Germany has just forced Facebook to accept accounts under pseudonyms (Facebook previously banned any account that didn’t broadcast your real name to the world), which has to be upsetting to the Zuckerberg family – if one country gets a little more privacy, then some day everyone will want it.
CBS News:

A picture that Zuckerberg’s sister posted on her personal Facebook profile was seen by a marketing director, who then posted the picture to Twitter and her more than 40,000 followers Wednesday.
That didn’t sit well with Zuckerberg’s sister, Randi, who tweeted at Callie Schweitzer that the picture was meant for friends only and that posting the private picture on Twitter was “way uncool.” Schweitzer replied by saying the picture popped up on her Facebook news feed.
The picture shows four people standing around a kitchen staring at their phones with their mouths open while Mark Zuckerberg is in the background.

It’s an interesting question as to what expectation of privacy you should have when you post a personal photo to Facebook. We already know that employers are scouring Facebook — and even asking prospective job seekers for their Facebook log-in info — in order to find out all the dirt they can before hiring you.
Are you really signaling to the world that your family photos are private when you post them on a social network that has 800 million active users?