The Worst Mistakes Mark Zuckerberg Made With Facebook

We’ve all accepted Facebook as being a part of modern life and pretty much unavoidable if you want to stay in contact with people you love. Despite it only being available for slightly over 15 years, Facebook is actively used by over one billion people. That’s a lot of Facebook accounts to manage for one person, which is why the history of Facebook hasn’t always been a flawless one.

Let’s take a look at some of the mistakes that Mark Zuckerberg made in Facebook’s evolution. I’ll give you a small spoiler: they’re for the most part all privacy related.

Default Visibility to Public

If you’re dabbled with Facebook’s privacy settings, you know that the current default option is to only show information with your friends. Once upon a time, when the ability to log in through Facebook on different websites was launched in 2008, this default setting was public. The big problem with this was of course that your website browsing history became public knowledge since even non-Facebook users could see which sites you visited. Just imagine!

Revealed Millions of Phone Numbers

In what Facebook referred to as a “bug”, millions of phone numbers had been exposed. While this in itself was bad enough, turns out that among the phone numbers were a fair decent amount that belonged to people that didn’t even have Facebook accounts. These were simply numbers that were exchanged by friends, and saved to Facebook’s data. Needless to say, people weren’t happy with that.