Silicon Valley played by a different set of rules. Facebook's crisis could put an end to that

Facebook was 2 years old when it introduced its most transformative feature: a news feed that offered users a running list of updates about their friends' love lives, favorite new bands and latest vacation photos.

For the hundreds of thousands of people on the social network, the idea of broadcasting personal details without consent came as a shock. There was backlash on the platform and demands that Facebook provide a way to opt out.

Facebook held fast and kept its news feed, which remains the platform's nerve center. Its then 21-year-old founder, Mark Zuckerberg, responded with a blog post titled "Calm Down. Breathe. We Hear You," in which he wrote "stalking isn't cool; but being able to know what's going on in your friends' lives is."

The future billionaire had made a gamble about the boundaries of privacy and won. It proved how much easier it was to release something new and deal with the consequences later - an ethos enshrined in the company's original mantra, "Move fast and break things."

It was a strategy that worked for years to come. Facebook pushed its users to share more personal information, providing the lifeblood for the company's dramatic growth