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Ever since Facebook was founded in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, has pushed its users to share more information about themselves. Time and again, users have pushed back, complaining that some new feature or setting on the site violated their privacy.

But the reaction has rarely been as strong as in the past few weeks, as users, privacy advocates and government officials in many countries lobbed increasingly vociferous complaints against the company. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg unveiled a set of controls he said would help people better understand what they were sharing online, and with whom.

The back and forth between Facebook and its users over privacy is gaining importance as the company’s growth continues unabated. It now has nearly 500 million users around the world, and its policies, more than those of any other company, are helping to define standards for privacy in the Internet age.

The new settings will simplify a system that required users to sort through about 150 options.

“Facebook is trying to change privacy on the Internet, and users are pushing back,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which recently filed a complaint about Facebook’s privacy practices with the US Federal Trade Commission. “This is about who controls the disclosure of data. Facebook cannot make that decision for users.”

Rotenberg and other privacy advocates said the changes that Facebook announced on Wednesday were generally positive, but they said they hoped for further changes and for more oversight from the US Congress and regulators.

Zuckerberg announced the changes during a press conference at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California. He appeared contrite and conceded mistakes, but did not apologize to users.

The latest crisis for Facebook began to build shortly after its conference for software developers in late April, where it unveiled new features and a plan to extend Facebook functions across the Web.

The company argued, as it has for some time, that more and broader sharing made the site better for everyone. While getting more information about users also helps Facebook customize the advertising it displays, Zuckerberg said none of the changes affecting privacy were financially motivated.

Some critics say the company was slow to respond to the resulting criticisms. But internally a debate was brewing, with some executives arguing that Facebook might be able to get away with making no changes to the site, said employees who asked not to be named.

Earlier user rebellions had eventually died down, and despite some defections publicized by technology weblogs, Facebook users were not canceling their accounts any more than at any other time.

But eventually the amount of bad publicity became impossible to ignore.

“No one likes to see the amount of feedback that we are getting,” Zuckerberg said. “A lot of the blogs and feedback were really negative.”

Zuckerberg said Facebook’s biggest mistake was failing to notice that as it added new features and its privacy controls grew increasingly complicated, those controls in effect became unusable for many people. “We probably should have been more sensitive to this issue beforehand,” he said.

Zuckerberg, 26, said the crisis was challenging, but not as stressful as fending off billion-dollar acquisition offers from the likes of Yahoo and Viacom when he was 22. “That was definitely the most stressful situation I had at the company.”

During the news conference, Zuckerberg said this would be the last overhaul to privacy controls for a while. He said the preferences that a user expressed with the new settings would apply to all future products and site changes.

“The big takeaway is, don’t mess with the privacy stuff for a long time.”

 

The New York Times