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By Larry Magid
news.cnet.com
May 26, 2010 8:06 PM PDT
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckberberg has had a tough few weeks.
At a Facebook developer's conference on April 21, he announced some changes to
Facebook's privacy policy, including the "Instant Personalization" program that
"connects" Facebook members' information on some third-party sites, including Yelp
and Pandora. He also announced that, going forward, application developers would be
able to hang on to user information indefinitely, rather than having to purge the
information from their servers daily. The developers in the audience cheered these
announcements, but some of Facebook's critics jeered them, touching off a backlash
that has spawned a movement to quit the social network and has prompted several
elected officials, including New York Senator Charles Schumer, to encourage the
Federal Trade Commission to look into the way Facebook handles personal information.
Based on conversations I've had with Facebook employees, the negative reaction to
these privacy changes caught many at Facebook by surprise and forced employees and
management to re-think the way they handle user information. On Wednesday, the
company held a press conference to announce some changes to its privacy policy and
settings, including what Zuckerberg referred to in a blog post as "one simple
control to set who can see the content you post."
A few hours after the press conference, I sat down with Zuckerberg at Facebook's
Palo Alto, Calif., offices to talk about how he has reacted to all of the recent
concern about privacy, how it affected him personally, and how he responds to
critics, including those behind "Quit Facebook Day" this coming Monday (scroll down
to listen to podcast).
Zuckerberg referred to the past few of weeks as "intense." He said that feedback
from their announcement at F8 "has been really constructive and the main thing we
heard is that people want simpler controls over how they share information on
Facebook."
Response to Quit Facebook Day
When asked about the Quit Facebook Day and the Diaspora project, a newly announced
open-source alternative to Facebook, he said, "Some people are going to be critical
and are going to have feedback, and we want to listen to that feedback. But,
overall, it doesn't seem like a big movement." He added that, "The same number of
people are promoting Facebook to their friends and encouraging them to sign up now
as were before all this, and the same number of people are sharing the same number
of things as they were before." He said that "some people have talked about
deactivating, but those numbers haven't changed either."
Can Facebook make money and not mine user data?
I asked Zuckerberg to respond to the often repeated concern that for Facebook to
grow and be valued as a multibillion-dollar company, it needs to do more than just
put up ads but monetize through mining users' information. Can the company meet its
financial goals and not do things that get people angry and worry them? "The answer
is clearly yes," he said. "We've focused on keeping the advertising on the site very
minimal and sparse...We run a lot less ads than a lot of other sites do...The reason
why we don't have to is because the ads work well and we're making enough money to
support ourselves...Over the long term, the best thing we can do is build products
that help people share and stay connected with the people they care about." He said
that, "If we do that people will use our products, and if they use our products we
make money from advertising."
Zuckerberg said, "there are all these misperceptions of how our site works." He
said, "There has been this rumor going around that's completely not true, which is
that we give information to advertisers, and we don't." He continued, "We don't sell
any information, and we never will." He added that "the site works because we help
you share information; when you do that, you're more engaged on the site. There are
ads on the side of the page, the more you're sharing...the model just all works
out."
Done making privacy changes
I asked Zuckberberg about "privacy policy change fatigue." This isn't the first time
Facebook has backtracked from changes in its privacy policies. There was the Beacon
program, which was eventually canceled after user complaints, and there was pushback
from the privacy policy change announced last December.
Zuckerberg responded that "privacy is a very sensitive issue that a lot of people
care about, so, yes, we have to be careful about it." He said, "We've been working
on these changes to our privacy system for the last six months, but now we're done.
We're not go to make changes for a long time." He said that "the simple control
applies not only to stuff you've shared in the past but to new products and services
that we launch going forward" so that people can "set the level of privacy that they
want to have and that will exist for a long time. No more changes."
In the rest of the interview, we talked about Zuckerberg's general attitudes toward
privacy, including how he says he tries to protect his own information. We also
talked about the possibility of children under 13 being allowed on Facebook (it's
not likely to happen, he says), Zuckerberg's desire to continue to expand
internationally, and the fact that Facebook is blocked by a lot of schools.
When I asked him about what he's excited about going forward, he said it included
working with other sites and game developers to make their applications more social.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19518_3-20006097-238.html
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