Facebook responds, bolsters privacy options for ‘”feed” features

September 8, 2006 | Matt Marshall | Comments |

facebooklogo1.jpgFacebook’s founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for the “feed” features the site released earlier this week, and unveiled some corrections.

Facebook has bolstered privacy controls, which is fully explained here (if you are a member). Zuckerberg blogged about his thoughts early this morning.

Here is the gist:

Somehow we missed this point with Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.

The comes in response to protests by hundreds of thousands of Facebook’s users about the features, which let users automatically see the updates on pages of other members of their college and chosen circle of friends. Protesters said it made it even easier for stalking and annoying voyeurism.

Next Story: Roundup: Slim Devices, ChaCha, Digg, eBay ibank of Web 2.0, more
Previous Story: Monitor110 raises $5M from DFJ et al., to help investors use Web intelligence

Bookmark and Share

Tags: ,

Photo of Matt Marshall

About the Author, Matt Marshall

Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • The new privacy features still don't go far enough, but it's a start. It's interesting that only 1% of facebook users complained, but on my campus the number of people who were in anti-feed groups totaled over 15% of the campus population.
  • Correction: I was mistaken. It was a global group that I thought was local.