Zuckerberg: Facebook "missed the mark" over privacy issues

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has admitted that his social network failed to respond quickly enough to its user’s growing concerns over issues of privacy.

“Sometimes we move too fast – and after listening to recent concerns, we’re responding,” wrote Zuckerberg in a column for the Washington Post. “The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information.”

“Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. 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,” he wrote.

As well as being hounded for the complexity of the social network’s privacy settings, Facebook came under fire when the Wall Street Journal highlighted that certain adverts on the website shared a user’s name or ID with the advertisers when clicked.

Zuckerberg promised that changes were on the way however. He said that his team were “working hard to make these changes available as soon as possible”, but did not specify an exact date when new privacy settings would go live on the website.

Will the recent privacy problems hurt Facebook much? I doubt it. Despite the high profile coverage Facebook’s privacy problems have generated, the Quit Facebook Day page only has just over 14,000 people signed up to deleting their profiles on the set date of May 31st. Compare that to the 400 million-odd people who use the social network and you can hardly imagine Facebook reps cowering in a corner.

Via: BBC