Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Talks About Privacy
Some interesting stories coming out of South by Southwest today, but none more appropriate for us here at BeenVerified than the media frenzy surrounding the chaos of Zuckerberg’s keynote interview and his admittance that Facebook messed up when it comes to user privacy. The Wired Magazine article, “SXSW: Zuckerberg Keynote Descends Into Chaos as Audience Takes Over”, detailed how the audience was not happy with the questions being asked and took it upon themselves to ask what they felt were the real issues. Apparently, “after some more shouted remarks, Lacy turned the microphones over to the members of the audience, challenging them to come up with better questions. Attendees rushed to the microphones and got right to it, asking Zuckerberg about privacy and data portability…”
We see this as momentum building around giving internet users control of their online identity and making it easy for them to take their data where they want, when they want. As mentioned in our last post, we have been working on something for the past few months that does just that and we are getting pretty excited to roll it out very soon.
Business Week also had an interesting detail of the events, “Facebook CEO Admits Missteps”, although a much more water downed version of the events. They focused more on Zuckerberg’s comments that indeed users want more privacy and control of their data. According to the article, Zuckerberg said, “almost all of the mistakes we made, we didn’t give people enough control,” he said. “We need to give people complete control over their information. The more control and the more granular the control, the more info people will share and the more we will be able to achieve our goals.”
We are curious to see what Facebook comes up with (if anything) to actually rectify this or if they are just talking to satisfy the masses. One thing I will mention about our upcoming new release is that the major focus is on granularity and giving our users the most control possible on each piece of information they wish to share with the world. It took a lot of work (basically, re-building our entire web application) but as Mark noted here, and we were able to tell months ago, we felt it was of utmost importance to help advance our business.
New release is coming soon and then we can really talk without being so cryptic ;)…
Photos: Jim Merithew/Wired
3 Responses to “Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Talks About Privacy”
Just like Google’s “OpenSocial”, I’m putting my money on Facebook being all talk about user privacy…Can we really expect BeenVerified to do any better?
By Vin on Mar 10, 2008
Lol…you are putting it mild. Business Week completely ignored how the interview really went down. I was there and it was crazy…
By Sam on Mar 10, 2008
@Vin…We like to think we spent the last few months working our tails off to accomplish just that. I can’t comment on the exact features just yet but I will shoot you an email and let you demo the new site prior to its rollout. You can tell us what you think…
By Josh on Mar 10, 2008