Twenty years ago last Sunday, Mark Zuckerberg launched “TheFacebook,” an online directory designed to let his fellow Harvard students search for each other by interest, house, or class. It was modeled after Friendster, a now-defunct social networking site that, well, was a lot like Facebook.
Zuckerberg touted TheFacebook’s robust privacy options in an interview with the Harvard Crimson at the time:
“You can limit who can see your information, if you only want current students to see your information, or people in your year, in your house, in your classes,” he said. “You can limit a search so that only a friend or a friend of a friend can look you up. People have very good control over who can see their information.”
As the Crimson noted, Zuckerberg was trying to restore his reputation on campus with TheFacebook. His previous creation was Facemash, a “Hot or Not?” clone that stole student photos from private…