14 DAY TRIAL // There’s been a lot of talk about Facebook privacy and, while a lot of it is warranted, it seems that most people are just exaggerating or reiterating the same points. Nonetheless, it’s a subject that’s not going away anytime soon and it looks like all this may have actually spurred change at the mammoth social network. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, has responded to all the criticism and has pledged to do something about the concerns. Specifically, he says simpler, easier to understand privacy options are coming, and they’re coming soon.
The 25-year-old CEO penned a column for the Washington Post today in which he expresses his views on the whole Facebook privacy debate. It’s nothing we haven’t heard before. Facebook grew too fast, it’s hard to keep up with people’s expectations while still evolving as fast as ever.
The gist of it is, ‘We moved too fast, people didn’t like it, but we’re listening.’ As such, Facebook will be introducing simpler privacy controls soon, it’s not the first time we hear about this. Zuckerberg says that Facebook believed that more granular controls would help people choose just the right settings for them, which he realizes now was a mistake.
More interesting, though, is part of the email conversation the CEO had with well-known blogger Rober Scoble. With Zuckberg’s permission, the blogger posted one email in which the CEO doesn’t mince his words as much.
“I’d like to show an improved product rather than just talk about things we might do.We’re going to be ready to start talking about some of the new things we’ve built this week. I want to make sure we get this stuff right this time,” Zuckerber said in the email.
“I know we’ve made a bunch of mistakes, but my hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place and that people understand that our intentions are in the right place and we respond to the feedback from the people we serve,” he explained.
Again, this is no exactly an apology, but he admits that Facebook made a mistake and says the company is now working to fix it. More info on this should be coming this week, he says, so we’ll know more soon enough. Hopefully, the changes aren’t just cosmetic and really do make it easier for people to understand the privacy settings and to choose the ones they’re comfortable with.