Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg says privacy controls ‘missed their mark’
FACEBOOK chief executive Mark Zuckerberg yesterday said the Internet social network will roll out new privacy settings for its more than 400m 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 yesterday 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’ 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 to delete their accounts in protest.