Privacy a Facebook priority: director Zuckerberg

DUBAI: User privacy is the priority of internet social networking site Facebook, which has come under fire from users for its privacy settings, the company's director of market development said on Sunday (17 October 2010) in Dubai.

"Privacy, I would say, is the number one most important thing for our company, and we're always listening to feedback," Randi Zuckerberg, the sister of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, said on the first day of the GITEX information and communication technology exhibition.

"We've recently rolled out a lot of new updates and controls to privacy.

You can now, every single time you post something, you can control who sees that. You can even pick certain people in your network, you can create lists," she said.

"We're always trying to listen to feedback and giving people more and more controls."

While Facebook has become the world's most popular social network with more than 500 million users, it has also been criticised for complex privacy controls and for requiring users to opt out of features that allowed access to their information.

Such complaints led the site to modify its privacy controls.

Facebook's origins have been the subject of two recent books and a hit Hollywood movie, "The Social Network."

Source: AFP