Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg declined an opportunity on Wednesday to apologise for his company’s abrupt privacy changes and said Facebook would continue to lead a drive toward increased personalisation of other websites and applications.
During an onstage interview at the D: All Things Digital conference, a week after Facebook reversed some policies that had been spreading Facebook user information on the Web, Mr Zuckerberg said that the company had learned from the feedback but would make future changes without users actively choosing to participate.
He said that it would be “pretty crazy” to require users to “opt in” to every new function, such as photos and mail, and he drew no distinction between those and systems like the “instant personalisation” that provide information on Facebook users as soon as they visited partner sites including Yelp and Pandora.
“My prediction would be that a few years from now, we will look back and wonder why all these sites weren’t personalised in some way already,” Mr Zuckerberg said. “The world is moving in this direction.”
Other relationships with partner sites, such as buttons that let Facebook users broadcast what they like there, have doubled traffic from Facebook to those pages, and Mr Zuckerberg said such statistics would increase adoption of the mechanism.
Just 26, Mr Zuckerberg said he would still be CEO whenever Facebook goes public. The top social networking site and one of the most visited places on the Web, Facebook is approaching 500m users.
Many of those users have objected to steady expansions in the amount of data about them Facebook makes public or more widely seen by default, unless the users change those settings. Zuckerberg said part of the recent outcry that “resonated” with him were the complaints about the complexity of those controls, which were simplified last week.
Some of the privacy concerns were exacerbated by publication of instant messages from Mr Zuckerberg during his college years, when he called Facebook users stupid for trusting him. On Wednesday, he said he regretted such exchanges. “I’m really sorry”, he said.
He said Facebook would continue to add staff and try new things instead of slowing down as the company grows. One of his goals, he said, was to try to make sure Facebook doesn’t make the same mistakes other companies have made.
“We try to make different mistakes” he said to laughter.
