Social Network Facebook adjusts privacy controls after complaints

This July 23, 2008, photo shows Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, delivering the keynote address during the annual Facebook f8 developer conference in San Francisco. - Contributed
NEW YORK (AP):

In Facebook's vision of the Web, you would no longer be alone and anonymous. Sites would reflect your tastes and interests, as you expressed them on the social network, and you wouldn't have to fish around for news and songs that interest you.
Standing in the way is growing concern about privacy from Facebook users, most recently complaints that the site forced them to share personal details with the rest of the online world or have them removed from Facebook profiles altogether.


Facebook responded to the backlash Wednesday by announcing it is simplifying its privacy controls and applying them retroactively, so users can protect the status updates and photos they have posted in the past.
"A lot of people are upset with us," CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged at a news conference at Facebook's Palo Alto, California, headquarters.
changes
The changes came after Facebook rolled out a slew of new features in April that spread its reach to the broader Web. Among them was a program called "instant personalisation" that draws information from a person's profile to customise sites such as the music service Pandora. Some users found it creepy, not cool.
Privacy groups have complained to regulators, and some people threatened to quit the site. Even struggling MySpace jumped in to capitalise on its rival's bad press by announcing a "new, simpler privacy setting."
To address complaints its settings were getting too complex, Facebook will now give users the option of applying the same preferences to all their content, so that with one click you can decide whether to share things with just "friends" or with everyone.
For those who found it complicated to prevent outside websites and applications from gaining access to Facebook data, there's now a way to do so in a couple of clicks.
It's not clear whether the changes will quell the unease among Facebook users, which has threatened to slow the site's breakneck evolution from a scrappy college network to an Internet powerhouse with nearly a half-billion people.

lost the users' trust
"They've lost the users' trust. That's the problem," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group. "In the earlier days, there was time to regain it. It's not so clear now. I think it's getting more serious than making changes and moving on."
For some users, the problem has been that the company has changed its privacy settings so often that keeping up with them became too much.

For Facebook, being seen as a company people can trust with the personal details of their lives is key. Users will only share information if they have control over who sees it.
"The kernel of what we do is that people want to stay connected and share with those around them," Zuckerberg said.

More recently, Facebook has come under fire for a security glitch that exposed some users' private chats, and another that revealed users' information to advertisers in a way they could identify them, going against Facebook's own terms of service.