Messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg at the age of 19 immediately after the debut of ‘Facebook’ have resurfaced. In the conversations, Zuckerberg referred to early Facebook users as “dumb f***s” for putting their trust in him and exposing personal information such as emails, photographs, and addresses.
Threads, Meta’s freshly launched app, has been chastised for tracking and collecting user data such as health, financial information, and location.
Threads, Meta’s new platform that attempts to compete with Twitter, received 50 million sign-ups in just 2 days of its launch. In response to a question on whether Threads can overtake Twitter, Zuckerberg stated, “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully, we will.”
Now it appears that an IM interaction Mark had with a college classmate back in 2004 foreshadowed what was to come, as he expressed surprise that so many individuals would freely pass over their information.
The conversation went as follows-
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
Friend: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
Sure, this was a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, not long after launching Facebook from his dorm room.
He may have been bragging to a friend, but he had no idea that Facebook would become a data treasure trove 19 years later, with more than 77% of Internet users, about 3.59 billion people worldwide.
