Meta’s boss was one of the first to realize the value of all this data, which would then be at the heart of his financial empire.
“If it’s free, you’re a product.” This timeless slogan has never been uttered by a cynical tech boss but still sums up the economic model deployed by GAFAM in the mid-2000s. And among the predecessors, a young student who quickly understood the value of personal data. His name is Mark Zuckerberg and in 2004 he was not yet 20 years old.
A true coding genius, he finds programming challenges and ideas to “engage” students at Harvard, where he studies. For example, he envisions the highly controversial FaceMash, a site for comparing women’s bodies. Overwhelmed by its success – but most criticized for the sexism of the tool – the young man then thinks about an online social network reserved for students.
In fact, he wasn’t the only one who had this idea as early as 2004. And he is not even the initiator of the project. Such a site has already been started by another student, Aaron Greenspan, who called it “The Face Book”. The idea is to make the student’s thrombinoscope easy to locate but Greenspan struggles to code a sufficiently stable site. He then approached Zuckerberg to consider a collaboration.
But the latter has a very precise idea of what he wants: a nice and light network and not a professional tool. So they will be competitors. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com – which later earned him a lawsuit from Greenspan.
“People give it to me”
And it works! Student accelerates quickly and gains users. Above all, he quickly understood the interest of personal data at a time when few people still understood its importance, as American journalists Shera Frankel and Cecilia Kang explain in their book. The Disturbing Truth (Albin Mitchell).
“I have over 4000 emails, photos, addresses (…) people give me of their own free will. I don’t know why. They trust me, poor bastards” he wrote to a friend.
Quickly, the site was a triumph and went far beyond the walls of Harvard. A year after its creation, it already has a million subscribers in American universities. From the first months, the first investors flooded it with money. Peter Thiel (PayPal) or Marc Andreessen (Netscape) believe it. For its part, Napster creator Sean Parker has been hired to lead the startup.
Meanwhile, TheFaceBook continues to collect large amounts of personal data: age, city, gender… a veritable gold mine. In September 2005, the site was now called Facebook and expanded to high schools.
Crazy climb
A year later, Mark Zuckerberg allowed himself to turn down a stunning offer from Yahoo: a million dollars. Its board of directors resigned to fight the decision. No matter, he’s built a reputation for himself and has a new idea to take things a step further: a news feed that combines all the data the site has. A way to keep users connected and share more information.
And it was during this launch that many voices were raised to condemn the use of personal data: suddenly, everything was revealed and displayed everywhere, from someone’s romantic situation to vacation photos.
The controversy escalated so much that Mark Zuckerberg timidly apologized… without changing anything. After a while, it will finally be possible to hide part of its information.
On September 26, 2006, Facebook opened to everyone and saw an explosion in the number of active users. For the company, it’s a crazy climb and data will quickly be at the heart of the site’s monetization. Twenty years later, the monetization of personal data remains one of the most difficult questions for the highest authorities.
But this accumulation of data, which has enabled the rise of targeted advertising, has above all made Facebook one of the largest companies in the world.
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