Facebook Instant Personalization

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Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has taken a lot of heat recently for changing Facebook’s privacy settings. Today, he was grilled at the D8 conference held outside Los Angeles by Wall Street Journal tech writer Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

As an attorney I would be very happy to have Mark as a client.  Not only because Facebook would be a billing bonanza, but he would make a great deposition witness. He is extremely careful with his answers and has a great ability to dance around questions.

One of the big issues of the day is why Facebook recently changed its privacy settings so that information posted on the service is public unless you decide otherwise.  If you were expecting a straight answer from the CEO of Facebook as to why, you were sh_t out of luck. As Mashable notes, there was no straight answer from Zuckerberg about why Facebook Instant Personalization was opt-out instead of opt-in.

On the other hand, if you are interested in obtaining information regarding your user information from Facebook, good luck.  They claim that user information is private.  Here is an email I received from Facebook when I sent a fax requesting the user information of my client whose  account was hacked:

Thank you for your email. We will investigate this report and take the appropriate
action based on our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. However, for privacy
and security reasons, we cannot provide any additional information about the account
at this time. Please have the account owner view the Privacy and Security pages of
Facebook's Help Center:

- Information on Hacked Accounts: http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=420

From here, they can take the appropriate steps to receive additional support. Please
also let the account owner know that they will need to contact us from either the
login email address associated with their account or a secondary email address they
own.

We apologize for any inconvenience this security policy may cause.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Guy
User Operations
Facebook

Watch the video of Mark Zuckerberg speaking about privacy: