Facebook CEO pledges another privacy rework

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that some of the changes the social networking site has made to its privacy settings "missed the mark" and promised new settings that would make it easier for users to control their personal information.

"There needs to be a simpler way to control your information," Zuckerberg wrote in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post on Monday.

"In the coming weeks, we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use."

He said the new changes would be available "as soon as possible."

Facebook has attracted growing scrutiny from politicians and regulators — including Canada's privacy watchdog — over how it treats the personal data of its users.

Facebook insists that it doesn't share its users' information without permission. But Zuckerberg admitted that its rapid growth may have come at an inadvertent cost to its more than 400 million users.  

'Sometimes we move too fast'

"It's a challenge to keep that many people satisfied over time, so we move quickly to serve that community with new ways to connect with the social web and each other," he says. "Sometimes we move too fast — and after listening to recent concerns, we're responding."

Zuckerberg's reference to "recent concerns" relates to one just last month. In April, Facebook launched new tools to help content developers incorporate information from Facebook into their sites and apps.

Zuckerberg on Monday pledged to give users "an easy way to turn off all third-party services."

Many Facebook users clearly don't know how their data is used — or don't care. They also don't realize that Facebook's default privacy settings could allow their personal information to be shared in ways they wouldn't want.

"We already offer controls to limit the visibility of that information and we intend to make them even stronger," Zuckerberg says.

The problem, in the view of some critics, is that Facebook's default privacy settings for personal information have become more permissive in the last few years. 

While Facebook does offer privacy controls, many users have been confused by the array of privacy options offered.

Canada's Office of the Privacy Commissioner has been among the most vocal critics of Facebook's privacy policy. Last year, the commissioner said some Facebook policies contravened Canadian privacy law.

"One of the biggest concerns we raised was the over-sharing of users' personal information with third-party developers who create popular Facebook applications such as games and quizzes," privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said at the time.

Confusion

Her office's investigation of the social networking site found that Facebook's information about privacy was often confusing or incomplete.

Later in 2009, Facebook came up with a new, 5,000-word policy document in an attempt to address some of the privacy commissioner's concerns. For a while, Facebook's pledges satisfied the privacy commissioner. But the entente didn't last long.

In January 2010, the privacy commissioner launched a new Facebook probe. Stoddart got a complaint from a Facebook user who said the networking site's new default privacy settings, which had been introduced in December 2009, would make his personal information less private than the settings he had previously put in place.

"The individual's complaint mirrors some of the concerns that our office has heard and expressed to Facebook in recent months," said Elizabeth Denham, the assistant privacy commissioner.

Monday's announcement of more changes was an acknowledgement that the current policy is, at the very least, just too complicated.

Policy 'too complex'

"Many of you thought our controls were too complex," Zuckerberg wrote. "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."