Facebook CEO admits mistakes on privacy control

SAN FRANCISCO - The world's most popular social networking site will roll out new settings to make it simpler and easier for users to control their personal information, Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday.

Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook "missed the mark" with features that drew scrutiny from lawmakers, regulators and privacy watchdogs.

Details of the new settings were revealed in an opinion article in The Washington Post. Post chairman Donald E. Graham is a member of Facebook's board of directors.

Zuckerberg did not say when the new settings would be in place, just that Facebook is "working hard to make these changes available as soon as possible." One of the settings will make it easy to turn off all third-party services, he wrote.

"Facebook has been growing quickly. It has become a community of more than 400 million people in just a few years. It's a challenge to keep that many people satisfied over time, so we move quickly to serve that community with new ways to connect with the social web and each other," Zuckerberg wrote. "Sometimes we move too fast - and after listening to recent concerns, we're responding."

Technology blogger Robert Scoble posted with permission an e-mail exchange with Zuckerberg in which the Facebook executive acknowledged: "We've made a bunch of mistakes."