WaPo:

In a news conference, Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg chalked up recent stumbles to growing pains. He said that engineers and designers had holed up in a conference room in their Palo Alto offices over the past three weeks to work on new privacy settings.

“We don’t pretend that we are perfect,” Zuckerberg said in an interview. “We try to build new things, hear feedback and respond with changes to that feedback all the time.”

The changes, which will be introduced over the next few weeks, mean that one click can block any third-party sites from tapping into Facebook’s goldmine of data on a user. A similar one-click option will allow a user to stop applications on Facebook from tapping user information unless told otherwise. And in a reversal of a confusing feature introduced in December, users will be presented with simpler options on who gets to see information.

The Big Money’s Caitlin McDevitt says nice try, but she expects Facebook will make us mad again soon:

That’s all well and good, but Zuckerberg has said and done very little to address the most worrisome mistakes that Facebook has made recently—the sloppy, surprising sins that render even the strictest privacy controls useless.

Since the beginning of the year, Facebook has repeatedly made public various pieces of user data that it promised to keep safe. To recap: Facebook inadvertently sent personal messages to the wrong recipients in February and accidentally exposed everyone’s e-mails in March. A glitch revealed user event invitations in late April, and another one temporarily allowed people to see others’ private chats earlier this month. The biggest loophole just surfaced last week: Facebook had been sending personal data about its users to advertisers by mistake. The company moved fast to fix all of these glitches, but users shouldn’t be so quick to forgive and forget.

While giving users more control over their privacy settings is great, granular controls mean nothing if they don’t always work. What’s the point of fiddling with these new tools if the system can fail at any moment anyway? Facebook needs to hold up its end of the bargain.

CNet finds the new controls are generally easier to use but not as simple as they could be and has a tour with screen shots. SearchEngineLand’s Danny Sullivan says that when you drill down the new privacy settings are still pretty complex. ReadWrieWeb parses what it calls Zuckerberg’s half-truths. Mashable says with that done, it’s time to move on. I’m ready to.

Zuckerberg’s blog post on the announcement. Facebook’s Privacy Guide. CNet one-on-one w/Zuckerberg; NYTimes Bits Blog Q&A w/Zuckerberg.

You can find me @jwindish, at my Public Notebook, or email me at joe-AT-joewindish-DOT-com.