Mark Zuckerberg has gone public about privacy.
The Facebook CEO addressed the entire Facebook community in a Washington Post column today, admitting that the popular social networking site “missed the mark” with respect to user privacy and pledging to make it easier for people to control what they want to share.
“…[M]any of you thought our controls were too complex,” Zuckerberg said. “Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted.”
Zuckerberg promised to make privacy controls “much simpler to use”, as well as adding a feature to turn off third-party services such as Pandora, Yelp and various software developers.
Zuckerberg also reminded users that Facebook already has controls to limit a profile’s visibility, but assured readers that “we intend to make them even stronger.”
The pledge comes amid widespread criticism over Facebook’s privacy settings and threats by users to permanently delete their accounts unless the site changed its policy. Quit Facebook Day, a website urging Facebook users to delete their account in protest, says that more than 14,300 people have committed to removing their profile by May 31.
While Zuckerberg did not give an exact timetable as to when the new privacy settings will become available, he did say that they will be up “as soon as possible” and said that the developers will be “eager to get your feedback”.
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