Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t been speaking about the latest privacy changes, not because he’s trying to avoid the issue, but because they are working on rolling out major changes on the privacy front. In an email to Robert Scoble he stated that the company will “start talking about some of the new things we’ve built this week.” From the sounds of things, it’s going to be a relatively major overhaul.

The full text of the email is below:

Hey,

We’ve been listening to all the feedback and have been trying to distill it down to the key things we need to improve. I’d like to show an improved product rather than just talk about things we might do.

We’re going to be ready to start talking about some of the new things we’ve built this week. I want to make sure we get this stuff right this time.

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.

I hope we’ll get a chance to catch up in person sometime this week. Let me know if you have any thoughts for me before then.

Mark

While Tim Sparapani, Facebook’s Public Policy Director, told Kojo Nnamdi last week that new privacy settings were in the works. Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed that new privacy setting are in the works and hopefully that the company will rebuild the trust of the users once the latest privacy debacle is handled.

While there is clearly an argument to support Facebook’s position up until now, we’re hoping to see changes that give users much greater control, and also avoid duping users into sharing more information, as the last privacy redesign did in December. We’ve preached the concept of giving users control on multiple occasions and continue to believe that users should have control despite the debatable issue of how important the information being exposed really is.

Facebook is under immense pressure to bring forth new changes, not only backing down on some of their aggressive new programs announced at f8. We expect Facebook to release new features which both give users greater control and making privacy control much easier. We’ll be following the topic closely as Facebook prepares to roll out their privacy upgrades this week.

For the past ten days, Facebook has stopped updating application statistics. That means all leaderboards (including our own) based on Facebook’s statistics have stopped updating and developers can’t track how their application, or competing applications are performing. While we’re assuming that the statistics will get updated shortly, this is probably the longest period of time that we’ve seen the stats stop reporting.

One potential reason for the downtime is that Facebook has reallocated resources to work on other projects temporarily over the past week and a half in order to expedite the process of rolling out new privacy settings. Alternatively, the company is simply running into problems with their stats tools, although we’d doubt that’s the source of the issue.

Over the past few days we’ve received countless inquiries about why our leaderboards are no longer updating. Unfortunately for us, all of our data comes directly from Facebook and if they aren’t updating their data, we’re not updating ours! While I hope that the stats return to normal this week, they appears to still be set on statistics from ten days ago.

Last night the Wall Street Journal published about a new Facebook “privacy loophole” that resulted in user information being shared with advertisers. The information that was often shared by Facebook was the username of the person who clicked on the ad as detailed by Ben Edelman. While Facebook has become the subject of security attacks in recent weeks and has come under fire for legitimate concerns, your username has always been for sale, and not by Facebook.

A number of companies in the “social media” space are in the business of selling your data to third parties. Interestingly enough, many of these companies already have the profile data of the majority of Facebook users. That information has been systematically collected through applications as well as public resources found through Google. Trust me, the advertiser who could have theoretically collected your username through ads (even though they probably didn’t realize this was possible), would have paid more for your data by purchasing Facebook ads than going direct to third-party data sales companies.

The irony of the recent Facebook privacy debacle is that Facebook is actually attempting to give users more control, while third-parties are simultaneously stripping users of it. Yes, Facebook has overstepped their boundaries with the new “Instant Personalization” program in my own opinion, however most of your data has been accessible as long as you’ve been on the site.

Most likely that information was shared through third-party applications, but even if you chose not to use those applications, new data sales companies will create profiles of you based on the data you placed across multiple social networks. While we could dive into more details about the business of data sales the main point is this: having your Facebook username shared with advertisers is the tip of the iceberg.

The best way to protect your information is to avoid posting online anything you don’t want public. While I support users’ right to privacy, it’s best to assume your data is already available to other parties the moment you put it online. While I think we’re in the midst of a greater debate over the future of user privacy on the web thanks to the latest Facebook changes, the users already had control the moment they put their information into the ether.

A Facebook Page and group which were called “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!” have been pulled from Facebook following protests, and the eventual banning of Facebook in Pakistan. In turn, a number of Facebook users decided to join new versions of the groups, but I’d expect those to be pulled eventually as well. Administrators of the new groups are claiming “Free Speech”, however the Pakistani government doesn’t seem to view things in such a positive light.

Numerous controversies have sprouted up over the years over drawings of Mohammed, including a Danish cartoonist who sparked backlash in multiple Arab countries after drawing multiple cartoons of Mohammed for a book cover. The debate over whether or not images of Mohammed should be drawn have raged on for years, but when Pakistan banned Facebook due to groups which posted such pictures, the debate was reignited. One group, succeeded at attracting over 100,000 members and more than 11,000 photos of Mohammed.

While Facebook obviously hopes Pakistan will restore access to the site, it’s difficult for the company to constantly monitor groups which post Mohammed cartoons. Facebook most definitely has a team to filter through any offensive photos, however images depicting Mohammed have never been on the ban list. It will be interesting to see if Facebook decides to ban remaining groups and pages (like this one and this one).

For now it appears as though Facebook would prefer to block the groups for the purpose of cultural sensitivity rather than engage in a free speech debate. Do you think Facebook should have pulled such Pages and groups? One interesting note is that Facebook has yet to pull the large Facebook Page which calls for the death of Obama.

Less than 24 hours after we first covered Facebook’s decision to limit landing tabs within Facebook Pages to “authenticated” admins, the company has appeared to revert back to the original permissions, making landing tabs available for anybody. The change was rapidly criticized by more Page administrators who use landing tabs as an easy way to convert new visitors into fans.

While we’ve reached out to the company for clarification about whether or not this change back to the original settings is permanent, we still haven’t heard back from the company regarding their policy on the new “authenticated Pages”. We’ll be sure to update if we hear more from Facebook, however there’s no doubt that many Page administrators will be grateful that Facebook has stepped back from what would otherwise be a permanently damaging change.

Facebook’s motivation behind the change wasn’t exactly clear, however we speculated that it was to reduce spam and potentially increase revenue. For Facebook to make such a significant change without any formal notice, aside from an update to the developer forum, is pretty significant. At this point Facebook appears to have gone back to the original settings, enabling anybody to set a custom tab as the landing tab, however we’ll have to wait to hear back from Facebook to confirm that this change is permanent.