Some Say Facebook Could Be in Trouble After Last Night’s Interview With Zuckerberg

CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg is finally answering the hard questions about Facebook privacy issues. During an interview with Wall Street Journal Columnists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the annual All Things Digital Conference last night, Zuckerberg stumbled over his answers and has people wondering what this means for Facebook.

Hosts Mossberg and Swisher kept pushing the fact that people are not happy with the instant personalization default instead of simply asking their permission to begin with.

“You push people's information into a position to where it is pretty much visible across the Internet unless they do a bunch of stuff about it [to make it private]” said Mossberg in the interview. To which Zuckerberg’s reply was essentially that these features were made to make the entire experience better and Facebook would not be the same without them.

Zuckerberg brought up how, if your music is set to be visible to everyone, Pandora can access your music and start playing the music you like as soon as you show up on the site. But people who want to share their music don’t necessarily want it to be given to a third party, especially if it is complicated to change it back.

Still Zuckerberg believes personalized websites and applications are the future and feels our descent into that era is an important one.

Reactions to the interview, however, were not as optimistic. Many blogs and articles focused on the fact that Zuckerberg was sweating during the interview and seemed to evade the pointed questions he was asked. He was “literally dissolving in his own sweat” said John Paczkowski in a MSNBC article. Other blogs went as far as to say the entire interview was a “disaster” or could prove to be damaging to Facebook”, according to Computer World.

One thing is for sure; Zuckerberg should not have answered questions about privacy he did not know that answers to.