Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Talks Privacy, Calls Snapchat ‘Super Interesting’

Snapchat could have been part of the Facebook family if it hadn’t turned down an alleged $3 billion offer, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his thoughts on the popular service.

During a recent talk onstage at Stanford University, Zuckerberg was asked about the NSA, venture capitalists and of course Snapchat.

Zuckerberg talked about privacy, and what people are comfortable with sharing:

There was no privacy infrastructure to communicate with your community or just a set of friends all at once, and because of the lack of that, basically if people wanted to communicate something they had to choose to communicate with a very small audience or communicate it publicly. A lot of times you’re not comfortable communicating it publicly and maybe it’s just not worth communicating it to a small set or that’s not the full potential of what you want to communicate so you just don’t do it, it just gets lost.

Eventually, the conversation was brought back around to Facebook:

So I actually think kind of the fundamental innovation that Facebook brought was creating this space. Right, which is really, it’s a private space that didn’t exist before. That there was no tool to be able to communicate in that space, and by opening that up and enabling people to kind of fill that space we unlocked a huge amount of potential in terms of people being able to communicate ideas and learn about what’s going on around them.

However, Facebook has encouraged users in the past to share publicly, so while it may have brought “fundamental innovation,” Zuckerberg’s statement appears to be a contradiction.

Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg had to say about Snapchat:

I think Snapchat is a super interesting privacy phenomenon because it creates a new kind of space to communicate which makes it so that things that people previously would not have been able to share, you now feel like you have place to do so.

And I think that’s really important and that’s a big kind of innovation that we’re going to keep pushing on and keep trying to do more on and I think a lot of other companies will, too.

Over the past weekend, Snapchat was hit by spam, and shared a quick tip to help minimize spam as it looked into the major problem.