• Scobleizer et al., Monday, May 24, 2010 2:16 PM

Publicly addressing privacy issues for the first time since the launch of Facebook's Open Graph and Instant Personalization initiatives, founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg is admitting that mistakes were made.

"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," Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to tech blogger Robert Scoble on Sunday (which Scoble made public with Zuck's express permission).

Now, in an op-ed published in today's Washington Post, Zuckerberg admits: "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 ... We will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services."

Zuckerberg insists, however, that claims that Facebook was selling personal data to advertisers were all wrong. "We do not give advertisers access to your personal information ... We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone."

The question now is whether the young CEO was too slow to face mounting privacy concerns, and whether the coming changes will go far enough to quell those concerns.

"They're hitting several problems that all point to trust, an eroding of trust that we have with Facebook the company and Facebook the service," Scoble tells CNNMoney.com.

Likely to make any Facebook insider cringe, eWeek reminds us that "Zuckerberg made headlines earlier this year when he declared privacy was no longer a 'social norm.'"

Despite the recent upheaval among users and industry insiders, however, Zuckerberg on Monday still "stopped short of offering users the choice of opting in to having all their information spread throughout the social network and the internet -- which may mean that the new settings will not satisfy users after all," The Guardian writes.

Indeed, in what Fast Company calls the "usual Zuckerberg rot", Zuck say in WaPo: "If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more." This, adds Fast Company, "is the important line, indicating that Facebook's goal is still to get its users to share lots more content with each other, and the Web in general -- this is Zuckerberg's old mantra that privacy doesn't exist or is irrelevant."

Read the whole story at Scobleizer et al. »