Mark Zuckerberg Is Sorry (Again)
Facebook’s history involves multiple apologies—and after a while, they begin to sound the same.
Photo: DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES01September 2006
**News Feed Nuisance** When Facebook first launched News Feed, users revolted. Zuckerberg wrote his first apology letter, writing “we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them.” Eventually, people got used to the feature, and the uproar died.
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Photo: DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES03December 2007
**Beacon Brouhaha** When Facebook announced its first targeted advertising product, Beacon, users were outraged that the company was using their information to help advertisers target them. After complaints, Zuckerberg announced that Beacon had been made opt-in, and that Facebook would release a feature that let people turn it off completely.
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Photo: STEPHEN LAM/REUTERS05December 2009
**Tool Time**\ \ This time, Facebook attempted to get out ahead of users’ data concerns, launching new privacy tools that aimed to “empower people to personalize control over their information,” according to an announcement from Zuckerberg. Yet critics complained the tools were a) confusing and b) pushed users to make even more of their personal information public.
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Photo: STEVEN SENNE/AP07May 2010
**Break Things**\ \ *The Wall Street Journal* reported that advertisers were using a privacy loophole to retrieve revealing personal information from Facebook and other social networks. Facebook quickly excised the identifying code from its software—and a few days later, in an apologetic *Washington Post* op-ed, Zuckerberg announced plans to redesign its privacy settings.
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Photo: DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES09November 2011
Privacy Predicament After the FTC charged Facebook with deceiving consumers by saying they could keep their information private, and then allowing it to be shared and made public, Facebook agreed to a settlement. Zuckerberg then offered up a list of new tools Facebook had made available to help users control their privacy and announced he’d have two chief privacy officers going forward, instead of one.
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Photo: GUILLERMO GUTIERREZ/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES11January 2013
**Control Issues**\ \ In January, Facebook rolled out a search product called Graph Search, designed to let users search any topic inside Facebook. This riled privacy activists, because it allowed people to unearth any information a user hadn’t pro-actively protected. Days later, one of Facebook’s chief privacy officers respond to the concerns, kicking off a trend of the company addressing privacy concerns after the fact.
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Photo: JOSH EDELSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES13March 2018
**Facebook Under Fire**\ \ After five days of silence, Zuckerberg finally weighed in on the reports that Facebook had failed to protect its users from Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of personal data. Less than a week later, the company has promised once again to improve its privacy settings. The announcement reads, as usual, like a mea culpa, headlined: It’s Time to Make Our Privacy Tools Easier to Find. In other words, it’s a version of something we’ve all heard before.
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Jessi Hempel is a former senior writer at WIRED covering the business of technology. Before joining WIRED, she served as a senior writer for Fortune, where she penned cover stories on Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as IBM and RIM. In the past, she has written in-depth articles ... Read more
