Zuckerberg responds to privacy concerns

Without judgment, I think it's important to point out in that at no point did he admit that Facebook screwed up, nor did he at any point apologize for anything.

Nothing more than a PR / shill piece with a bare bones disclosure at the bottom, "Washington Post Chairman Donald E. Graham is a member of Facebook's board of directors."<p>Time to read the NYT and WSJ for the real view on how mass print media views the privacy issue. I won't waste 10 seconds reading another Post piece on Facebook.

the whole piece is totally disingenuous and it isn't anything new from what we've heard from them before.<p>the worst part is the end when he subtly tries to use the fact that it started out as a dorm room project as some sort of excuse as to why the company is having all of these problems.

We've been here before:<p><a href="http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130" rel="nofollow">http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130</a>

<i>We do not share your personal information with people or services you don't want.</i><p>Ah, so I guess all those people whose phone numbers are streaming through "Evil" or whose updates about their rectal surgery are being exposed through the Open Graph API <i>want</i> this information to be floating around the Web.

If he truly believes what he writes, why not default privacy to only displaying say your name and display picture. No problems for anyone to find you then and if you really want to share everything you write to the world you can alter from the default.

It just seems like a drab, corporate BS message lacking any sincerity.<p>(tongue-in-cheek humor) I propose UNIX style privacy controls - user, group, world.

Zuckerberg acknowledges that complex privacy controls are a problem. But I suspect that's only true because the defaults are evil. If users didn't have to worry about being deceived, they wouldn't complain about complex controls because they'd rarely use them.<p>Like simplicity, defaults are hugely important in UI design. But Zuckerberg appears to be carefully avoiding the subject.

Why does Zuckerberg make this announcement, which ultimately affects all of his 400 million customer base, in a buried article for the Washington Post?<p>Surely it's best to communicate with your customers directly, y'know, with a Facebook message or something?<p>Looking at blog.facebook.com right now, there is no sign of this, nothing officially on facebook.com. This is why people don't trust Facebook.

This time I am going to wait to see what changes they bring<p>I'm still happy to give FB a break over this; they've done a lot to improve privacy in recent months and IMO get credit for that. I'm still having a hard time verifying the vast majority of "privacy violations" people seem to be finding; I suspect they don't really exist in the way they are presented. Obviously there are one or two that are a problem (and I hope they address that) such as the information that can no longer be hidden from search.<p>I've been playing the Facebook privacy game for a long time - and from that perspective most of this current reporting/outrage is either a) people getting on a bandwagon/following the crowd or b) misinformed. Amongst that <i>the smattering of genuine complaints has mostly been lost</i> to the noise. In a few months it will be back to a few of us pressing those issues again....<p>Bottom line is; the problem is in creating effective controls people understand. They really need to crack that, and if that is what the current fad achieves then great.

Yes oh mighty and complex one. The problem is that we're too simple to grasp your controls. Asshat.<p>How about a simple radio button: [] Share my information with 3rd parties [] Do not share my information with 3rd parties<p>Put it right at the end there as an override in case we can't understand some of your more complex settings.

More B.S. from Zuckerberg. He should have said, "We screwed up. We're sorry, we're fixing it, and we won't do it again." Instead we get nonsense about how "The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information."<p>Um... no, the biggest message you have heard recently is that people don't want you destroying the terms of service they agreed to with unilateral, opt-out changes, you greedy tool.

It's good to hear that Facebook is addressing the privacy issues, but it's a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. A lot of information which people believed to be private has already been disclosed, and they'll have to live with any consequences which may arise from that. Once trust is gone it's difficult to win back.

Yeah. I'm not convinced.

See the comments on this post on Facebook itself<p><a href="http://www.facebook.com/posted.php?id=20531316728&#38;share_id=125788394107023&#38;comments=1#s125788394107023" rel="nofollow">http://www.facebook.com/posted.php?id=20531316728&#38;share_...</a>

Facebook users' privacy is directly in conflict with the company's stated goal:<p>"If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that's more open and connected is a better world. These are still our core principles today."<p>In other words, Zuck is bent on setting your personal information free so that "people share more".<p>That "response" doesn't make me feel so warm and fuzzy.

The best response would be to stop mucking with the information that your users want to be private.

Here are the principles under which Facebook operates:<p>-- You have control over how your information is shared.<p>-- We do not share your personal information with people or services you don't want.<p>-- We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.<p>[clip]<p>Ahahahahahahahahahahahahah. This is why Queerty and Pandora silently installed applications on my profile and had access to my data without me opting into anything (I've never used Connect or anything like it). Or why Instant Personalization was turned on automatically.<p>You pissed off a population of users, arguably who are tuned-into this discussion and many of which are technical enough to call you on your BS. The candy coated, lets see how little we can get away with, isn't going to work. In fact, it's only going to make things work.<p>If the new settings are good, good. Maybe they will avert some of the mistrust that many view towards them. I certainly won't forget the shit that went down on my profile w/o my permission in the last 2 months. Maybe an apology, an admission of a bad idea, etc would be more convincing.<p>At least Google had the stones to say, rather quickly, Oops, sorry, we shouldn't have done that.