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Protecting Your Social Media Data | Mark Weinstein from MeWe

The internet was pioneered by independent enthusiasts and inspired by the possibility of connecting people and enhancing culture. Though much of its promise came to fruition, it’s fair to say a great deal of it has been corrupted.

Central to these issues is how our personal information is traded, sold, and utilized for marketing purposes. This matters a great deal to Mark Weinstein, who founded one of the first social media platforms, Supergroups, in 1998.

Today he’s trying to take the internet back from the data miners with his new social media platform, MeWe. On this edition of Founders Journey, Mark discusses what motivated him to reenter the social media space, and why he believes his work is so crucial for this moment in history.

More information: https://mewe.com/


Mark Weinstein is the Founder and Chief Evangelist of MeWe. Mark is world renowned as a leading privacy advocate and one of the visionary inventors of social networking. Mark’s TED Talk  in March 2020: “The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism”. 

Mark is ranked one of the “Top 8 Minds in Online Privacy,” and was named “Privacy by Design Ambassador” by The Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada. Mark’s articles about privacy and social media have appeared in The Wall  Street Journal, NY Post, The Mirror (UK), HuffPost, USA Today, and many others. He has been interviewed on CNN, Fox News, Fox Business, BBC, PBS, etc. 

Mark has been a featured speaker and social media/privacy expert on the stage at many conferences around the globe, including EY’s Strategic Growth Forum, KNOW Identity Conference, Global Security Conference, GMIC New York, Security BSides Vancouver, and Customer Experience Asia. 

Back in 1998, Mark created SuperFamily.com and SuperFriends.com, which were ranked by PC Magazine as “Top 100” sites 3 years in a row. Mark sold those companies in the early 2000s and then built an executive coaching company, also giving keynotes and authoring books on personal and professional greatness, titled “Habitually Great”, which won 2 Indie Book awards and were endorsed by Stephen Covey. 

A decade later, as Facebook began to dominate social media, Mark Zuckerberg stated, “Privacy is a social norm of the past,” and that statement made Mark Weinstein’s jaw drop. With guidance from MeWe Advisor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the Web), Mark endeavored to build the next-generation social media experience that gives people all the great features of social media while eliminating spying, targeting, newsfeed manipulation, and undermining democracy.

MeWe launched officially in 2016 at SXSW where it was named SXSW Start-Up of the Year Finalist. Today, MeWe is the new mainstream social network with millions of members worldwide, data privacy, no ads, and no newsfeed manipulation. MeWe is social done right! 

Mark received his MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. He resides in Colorado. 

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