Zuckerberg acknowledges "stupid" collegiate behavior on-stage

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg literally sweated out a tough interview on-stage at The Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD conference today.

He admitted that when he was younger and still running Facebook out of his dorm room, he sometimes behaved in an immature way. Reports emerged that he called users “dumb [expletive]s” for trusting him with their data in instant messages and that he had hacked into rival websites. Zuckerberg didn’t confirm or deny this, saying:

“When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that … Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t … There are pranks, IMs … I started building this when I was around 19 years old and along the way a lot of stuff changed. We went from building a service in a dorm room to running a service that 500 million people use.”

He added: “I can’t go back and change the past, I can only do the best that I can do moving forward.”

After dodging around several privacy-related questions, Zuckerberg took off his hoodie sweatshirt on-stage (pictured above). It had Facebook’s motto imprinted on the inside. “Oh my God. You’re a cult,” joked Kara Swisher, who interviewed him.

Zuckerberg said the company wanted to remove friction from the user experience by creating an opt-out instant personalization program that shared user data with vetted third parties like Pandora and Microsoft.

The company has come under fire recently for a series of privacy changes that progressively defaulted more user information to be public. It then backtracked last week, revealing a new and simpler approach to privacy control by consolidating options to a single front page.

A fuller transcript of his interview is at AllThingsD’s website.

[Photo courtesy of SFWeekly's Alexia Tsotsis]

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