One-on-one with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg speaks to the press on privacy.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)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 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.
Listen to the entire 13-minute interview with Mark Zuckerberg.
Listen now: Download today's podcastSubscribe now: iTunes (audio) | RSS (audio)
Disclosure: I serve as co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a nonprofit Internet safety organization that serves on Facebook's Safety Advisory Board and receives funding from the company. ConnectSafely wasn't one of the organizations listed in their announcement and we didn't specifically approve the changes, but I was pre-briefed.
Larry Magid is a technology journalist and an Internet safety advocate. He's been writing and speaking about Internet safety since he wrote Internet safety guide "Child Safety on the Information Highway" in 1994. He is co-director of ConnectSafely.org, founder of SafeKids.com and SafeTeens.com, and a board member of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Larry's technology analysis and commentary can be heard on CBS News and CBS affiliates, and read on CBSNews.com. He is not an employee of CNET. He also writes a personal-tech column for the San Jose Mercury News. You can e-mail Larry or follow him on Twitter @larrymagid. 
Deliberately tricky settings... and some pages don't seem to save after you hit 'save'....
For example:
Privacy Settings -> Applications and Websites
Uncheck most of the boxes... hit save.... go do some other stuff... come back. Most will be checked again.
I'm REALLY close to just deleting my account, but was trying to give them a chance to fix things.
I've never really understood the fascination with it. I signed up because a few of my friends seem to like to communicate that way. Other than the the core 'social networking' aspect, everything else the site does is second-rate. It's kind of like the M$ of Web 2.0.
What you are actually doing when you click "preview my profile" is looking at what your profile *already* looks like to everyone live.
It's more a "review" of the settings you've just changed and gone live with, not a "preview" of what your profile might look like if you select a privacy setting.
"preview" should mean "preview".
Definitions of preview on the Web:
"a screening for a select audience in advance of release for the general public"
http://www.google.com/search?q=define:preview&oi=glossary_definition
Please everyone go and check this out and see for yourself so that you know how retarded it is.
Do NOT do the following!
1.) Post any information on there that you do not want anyone to see.
2.) Post phone numbers on your sight or comments.
3.) Post your address on your information page or comments.
4.) Download anything that might risk you getting a virus on your page or computer.
These are some general rules that I go by. I enjoy my Facebook and will always support them. Remember that you still have a choice when using Facebook, they have done nothing wrong here. If you do not like there privacy standards then do not put information on your site for other people to see. The internet can be very dangerous, and if people want they can hack into just about anything these days. But the internet is also a great tool!
Sure, anything CAN get hacked into, but my general expectation is that it won't. With Facebook, you have to just assume they are selling it to someone, even if they tell you they are not. And, yes, they ABSOLUTELY have done things wrong here. They even violate their own 'privacy' policy (I say 'privacy' because what it really does is tell you how they are going to use your information, not keep your information private).
I understand how business works... Facebook's customer is the advertisers and people who buy their data... the Facebook users are the raw material Facebook works with. Anyone who thinks Facebook users are the customer is NUTS. That said, they have a responsibility to 1) be clear about what is being traded in order to provide the 'free' service, 2) to stick to those policies and respect what people have agreed to trade and not trade.
Facebook founder called trusting users dumb f*cks
Peace Prize for Mr Zuckerberg?
Loveable Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called his first few thousand users "dumb f*cks" for trusting him with their data, published IM transcripts show. Facebook hasn't disputed the authenticity of the transcript.
Zuckerberg was chatting with an unnamed friend, apparently in early 2004. Business Insider, which has a series of quite juicy anecdotes about Facebook's early days, takes the credit for this one.
The exchange apparently ran like this:
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb f*cks
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
- by ALAYIAH03 July 22, 2010 9:09 AM PDT
- awsome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Like this Reply to this comment 1 person likes this comment
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- by ALAYIAH03 July 22, 2010 9:10 AM PDT
- i love this comment because all the exleemation marks
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