In the wake of a firestorm of criticism over its privacy policies, Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that errors were made, and he promised to make amends. “I know we’ve made a bunch of mistakes,” he wrote in an open letter to tech blogger Robert Scoble, “but my hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place.”
In the e-mail, published by Scoble on Sunday, Zuckerberg added that “people understand that our intentions are in the right place” and the company responds “to the feedback from the people we serve.”
‘Missed Our Mark’
In an op-ed in Monday’s Washington Post, Zuckerberg wrote that, “after listening to recent concerns,” the company is responding.
One of the main complaints about recent privacy-related changes was that user controls to change settings were too complex. “Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls,” he wrote, but “we just missed the mark.” He said simpler-to-use privacy controls will be added within weeks.
He also wrote that there was confusion about the principles under which Facebook operates. Those principles, Zuckerberg said, are that the user controls how information is shared, advertisers do not get access to personal information, the information is never sold, and Facebook will remain a free service.
There has been a major backlash from Facebook users about what has been perceived as an erosion of privacy. Last month, the popular social-networking site launched new features that make users’ likes and dislikes available on partner sites. “Like” buttons, which have quickly become famous, are placed on the partner sites to reflect a user’s interest in the site, photos, blog posts, songs and similar content.
Didn’t ‘Take All the Lessons’
Clicking on the Like button makes that information viewable by a user’s friends — and, in the aggregate, to…