Addressing a gathering at the ‘Crunchies’ awards in San Francisco on Friday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, 25, said that in the ever-growing social networking online scenario, the expectation of privacy no longer remains a “social norm.”

Speaking with reference to the last-month-introduced Facebook’s privacy settings’ change – that evidently encouraged the social network’s users to set all their personal information to public, Zuckerberg hinted that the social norms have evolved to a ‘buck naked’ state in the present times. 

Zuckerberg elaborated his opinion saying that people not only starting showing much greater ease in terms of sharing more information of different kinds, but have also become more open with more people. 

Justifying the changes made to the privacy settings of Facebook users, Zuckerberg said that for companies like Facebook, it is important that the changing social norms are aptly reflected, so as to retain their relevance as well as competitive edge.

Zuckerberg said that not many sites would have the courage to undertake the task of a privacy change for 350 million, and most of them would remain “trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built.”

Zuckerberg added that for Facebook it was a really important thing “to always keep a beginner's mind.” About the need to change privacy settings, he said: “We decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”