Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is attempting to squash the latest round of criticism of Facebook, admitting his company “made a bunch of mistakes” and just “missed the mark” on privacy control.
Still, he stopped short of an apology and gave no sign Facebook would halt its campaign to re-make the world’s social norms.
Zuckerberg broke his silence on the recent backlash against his company in an op-ed Monday in the Washington Post and in a Sunday e-mail to corporate blogger-for-hire Robert Scoble.
Zuckerberg confirmed Faceboook would roll out simplified privacy controls soon and would make it easier for users to control which outside companies their profiled data was shared. The company came under intense scrutiny after its ambitious announcements at its developer conference in April that it created personalization features any web site could use and that it would begin sharing user data with outside websites such as Pandora and Yelp without prior permission.
Criticism of the company rose to a fever pitch over the last two weeks — as the features turned out to be shot-through with security holes. The tech industry, media and politicians reacted to Facebook’s ambition by complaining about the company’s privacy practices, and calling for it to get prior permission from its users before sending off info to third parties.
Last week on a radio show debating this writer, Facebook’s director of public policy Tim Sparapani announced the company’s upcoming simpler privacy settings, while audaciously describing Facebook’s personalization features as an “extraordinary gift to the public.”
In Monday’s
statement, Zuckerberg refrained from such bragging and pledged to add more privacy controls. But he did not back off his company’s seemingly perpetual push towards making users share more information publicly.
We have heard the feedback. There needs to be a simpler way to control
your information. In the coming weeks, we will add privacy controls that
are much simpler to use. We will also give you an easy way to turn off
all third-party services. We are working hard to make these changes
available as soon as possible.
Note that Zuckerberg is not saying that Facebook will get user permission before it shares user information with third parties — as Senator Chuck Schumer and Facebook’s original privacy officer called for — only that it will make it easier to opt-out.
Perhaps a better designed way to set how public or private of a person you are will quiet the latest furor — as we’ve mostly seen this show with Facebook before. Launch audacious feature, wait for outrage, sort-of apologize but not, and then mostly continue on as planned.
But I think Facebook’s ambitions are shining a bit too clearly now, and users aren’t really so upset about the privacy controls themselves as they are with Facebook’s size and ambition. Facebook has gotten to be the leader in social networking websites in no small part because it’s been willing to experiment.
But now its 400 million users seem to be telling Facebook that it better start acting less like a start-up — full of grand ideas, goofy enthusiasm and buggy code — and more like an adult company that has asked millions of people to trust it with their very personal data.
The question for Facebook will be whether it can actually respect that trust and its users, while simultaneously trying to build Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a Facebook empire, where all the net’s tubes lead to it.
