Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivering a keynote address at a conference in San Francisco in April 2010. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
Reuters
| Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the Internet social network will roll out new privacy settings for its more than 400 million users, amid growing concerns that the company is pushing users to make more of their personal data public.
“Many of you thought our controls were too complex,” said Zuckerberg in an opinion piece published on Monday in The Washington Post.
“Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark,” said the 26-year-old Zuckerberg, who co-founded Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004.
In the coming weeks, Zuckerberg promised, Facebook will add privacy
controls that he said would be much simpler to use.
Facebook will
also give users an easy way to turn off all third-party services,
Zuckerberg said.
It was not clear whether the third-party
services referred to applications designed to be used within Facebook,
such as games from companies like Zynga and Electronic Arts Inc’s
Playfish, or to separate websites which have recently begun to
incorporate Facebook data.
The comments come a few weeks after
Facebook, the world’s largest Internet social network, unveiled several
changes to its service that have prompted sharp criticism from privacy
advocates and spurred a few high-profile Facebook users, such as tech
commentator Jason Calacanis, to delete their accounts in protest.
A
feature called “instant personalization” automatically imports Facebook
users’ personal profile information to the music site Pandora and the
user-review site Yelp.
Another recent change forced Facebook
users to make some of their profile information, such as education,
hobbies and hometown, tied to public pages devoted to those topics.
And
many users decry the service’s byzantine privacy settings, which one
blogger has called the modern-day equivalent of the notoriously complex
task of programming a VCR.
Palo Alto, California-based Facebook
is a private company and does not disclose financial data, though
analyst estimates for its 2009 revenue range from $500 million to $650
million, primarily from selling online ads targeted at users based on
their activity and profile information on Facebook.
The service
is expected to reach half a billion users in the next several weeks, up
sharply from 150 million users in January 2009.
Facebook, what a mess. No wonder it is being run by a kid.
Tdub | May 24, 2010 1:29 PM | Reply
Facebook, what a mess. No wonder it is being run by a kid.
Yeah, a “kid” who’s also a billionaire. Facebook is essentially the most popular social media interface on earth, but I guess that was just luck on their part.
Durrrrrrr.
Facebook is a great service, it works very well, and I enjoy using it. Unfortunately I don’t appreciate how they treat me as a person who is an end-user of their service. In the most recent case they did make the controls too complex but more importantly they made parts of your profile public by default which the user had to turn off. If people were not paying attention you might have made public a picture or statement that would have been private under the old privacy policy. The problem goes beyond Facebook to other issuers of privacy policies such as banks in that they change the policies too frequently.
How do potential employers get to see a potential hire’s Facebook page when that potential hire has their Facebook page all tightened up–not allowing anybody to look? How do people get in? We all know they do. But how?
Yah, looking good there kiddo, wear a more raggedy hoodie to the next press conference, impress everybody with your professionalism.
I removed all of my personal information because I didn’t want it tied to outside websites. Not cool, fb. Change it back!
Facebook changes the privacy settings all the time on purpose, enough so the novice user does not know. With them linking your activities and even ure freakin music and movies to public pages, it essentially makes everyone public if you know their favorite band, or a movie, tv etc. I remember when facebook used to be cool, back when you were required to have a college email address to get a facebook. To the commentator privacy, you lookin to be creepin? Use your brain, they obviously made the recent changes so even if you are completely private and even have someone blocked, they could still see stuff if they really tried. Facebook is so lame these days with all the old people, parents, CEO’s, etc out there. They used to have programs that would let you see anything of anybody, and prob still do. Knowing da feds, they probably have access to anything of anybody. Cyber space is absolotely crazy to think about. And im gonna save u old timers the trouble of leaving comments sayin “you didnt spell that right” or “thats not a word”. Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. We all know that. Let me welcome you to the 21rst century. We are leavin comments on message boards, not writing a dissertation.
I’m finding it more difficult to trust these social networking sites given their lack of privacy concerns. The facebook CEO also seems to have done some shady things in the early days of FB and has showed complete apathy towards the privacy concerns of the users. The lack of privacy is reaching absurd levels in social networking with other sites like Blippy appearing on the scene. Hopefully, facebook makes some changes soon.
hehe o . k . so here’s exactly how dumb I am, halfway through reading your post I dropped my computer mouse and shut the firefox in error and I could not find your webpage again until 6 days later to finish reading through from the spot i had left off mainly because I didn’t remember how I linked to your site to begin with haha anyway it was worth the hold out..kudos