Facebook Responds to Privacy Issues

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has replied to the recent privacy concerns that have made the recent headlines in an open letter. Recently, Facebook has been criticized over privacy concerns and even had to shut down its own chat feature for a short time to address, another privacy problem. Facebook acknowledges the fact that controlling privacy in Facebook is rather difficult, partially because their UI is fairly bad for that particular feature – we think. For example, the guide to privacy is at the bottom of the page and is 900 words long – it’s been changed several times too (and even after reading it, most people don’t get it).

Mark Zuckerberg reminds the principles under which Facebook operates:

  1. You have control over how your information is shared.
  2. We do not share your personal information with people or services you don’t want.
  3. We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.
  4. We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone.
  5. We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.

The issue is that if people don’t get (1), then (2) is moot. By default, users expect that nobody but their friends have access to their data, that’s it. No one wants to spend time tweaking privacy settings that mostly impact how fast “the word spreads out”. Sometimes, we wonder if Facebook is taking privacy shortcuts to accelerate its growth. Or maybe the overly complex privacy settings were just a techo-geek error in judgment.

Facebook promises to address the problem by introducing privacy controls that are much easier to use “in the coming weeks”, so let’s wait and see how they will look like. At the moment, privacy concerns are an annoyance, but hardly a real danger for Facebook – which is the only social network where virtually everyone uses their real identity. That is the true value of Facebook, and unless there’s a privacy catastrophy, this is not going to change.

Related: Facebook virus spreads under sexy video disguise

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