After Facebook has been taking a PR pounding over the last few weeks over its privacy-control issues, its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has finally given a public response. He wrote in a column in the Washington Post today that Facebook will be adding simpler privacy controls and an easy way to turn off all third-party services.

That’s a step in the right direction, but I’m less than impressed with the language of the column. I think Mashable’s report about the column makes a good point:

I find Zuckerberg’s private response far more impressive than this public one. His private email to Robert Scoble, reprinted with Zuckerberg’s permission, included honest phrasing like “we’ve made a bunch of mistakes” and ” I want to make sure we get this stuff right this time”. Those concessions to critics verge upon being a mea culpa, even if they stop short of a direct apology. The Washington Post piece is much less direct: No doubt vetted by multiple members of the Facebook team, it almost seems to blame the users for being unable to work their privacy controls.

The word “sorry” never appears in the column, nor does “apologize”. In fact, the closest thing to a mea culpa is this line:

Sometimes we move too fast — and after listening to recent concerns, we’re responding.

I can’t help but notice the passive-aggressive undertone in that: “Sometimes we move too fast”, which, by implication, means those who complain about what Facebook does aren’t keeping pace.

Even in the e-mail, you can see how Zuckerberg hasn’t really learned all the lessons from this episode. He says he would rather have something to show before talking about what Facebook will do to address the concerns. But that just falls in with the general lack of communication from the company to its users that contributed to this fiasco in the first place. Think of it this way: If someone calls you up and asks you a question, do you just leave them holding to the sound of silence from your end while you go looking for the answer? Chances are you would give them at least a “Hang on, let me look.”

This line from the column also catches my attention:

The challenge is how a network like ours facilitates sharing and innovation, offers control and choice, and makes this experience easy for everyone. These are issues we think about all the time. Whenever we make a change, we try to apply the lessons we’ve learned along the way.

If people at Facebook are thinking about those issues all the time, then it just goes to prove the point I was making in an earlier post — Facebook’s privacy issues aren’t the results of incompetence, oversight, or mistaken assumptions about what its users want, but rather calculated moves. That people at Facebook think about such issues all the time doesn’t mean anything if they are thinking about new ways to “trick” or “force” you into sharing more than you want.

That brings to mind this snippet from NPR’s Science Friday show last week:

Mr. MOGULL: That’s always the risk, you know? You can’t argue with success. And let’s keep in mind, with all of these social networking services, we’re not their customers. I mean, we…

FLATOW: Right.

Mr. MOGULL: …don’t pay them money.

FLATOW: Right.

Mr. MOGULL: It’s the advertisers who are their customers, and we are their product that they sell.

Since we are not Facebook’s customers, we must question how much of their constant thinking about privacy-control issues is geared toward serving our interests and how much is geared toward serving those of their advertisers. Those two may converge at times on certain points, but in the end, I think they are often divergent, if not in conflict. This is not limited to Facebook or social networking sites. Advertising-subsidized media has the same problem, as I pointed out in a post awhile back about Demand media. Until the users of a product or service become the true customers for the provider of that product/service (i.e. its main source of revenue), there will always be that dichotomy between their interests.