To his credit, Mark Zuckerberg has responded to the outcry over privacy, including my column on the subject, by making significant changes to Facebook’s privacy policies.

The most welcome aspects of the changes, discussed by him on the Facebook blog, are that it will be far simpler for a user to control how information is shared, and these choices will apply to future Facebook services.

Facebook has also pulled back from its sleight of hand in making six types of data into “publicly available information” by reducing these to four, including taking users’ friends list out of the category.

Facebook is likely to announce some privacy changes soon in response to the furore over the complexity of its privacy controls and its sharing of user information. But are they going to be enough to address all the problems?

So far, it does not look very likely.

I call in evidence Mark Zuckerberg’s op-ed piece in the Washington Post in which he places the emphasis on complexity and leaves out the more fundamental question of whether Facebook should unilaterally declare some data as “publicly available information”.

Here is Mr Zuckerberg in the Washington Post:

Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark . . . We have heard the feedback. There needs to be a simpler way to control your information. In the coming weeks, we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use.

And here he is in an email to the blogger Robert Scoble:

I know we’ve made a bunch of mistakes, but my hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place and that people understand that our intentions are in the right place and we respond to the feedback from the people we serve.

As Rachel Sklar points out, the line that Facebook was just a bit enthusiastic and has gone too fast rather than too far, is not the same as the company committing itself to a fundamental change in approach.

In addition to reducing the complexity of its controls, I would like to see two things:

First, a change in its approach to using “opt-out” rather than “opt-in” privacy controls to push users toward sharing. As long as it sticks with the first,  many users will be caught sharing things they did not intend to because they are not concentrating hard enough.

Second, ending the idea of some information being unilaterally transformed into being “publicly available” without any choice. Mr Zuckerberg may be hinting at this by writing “we will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services” but I wait to see.