For those of you not hip enough (or recent enough graduates of college/high school) to be on Facebook, a little background: recently, Facebook redesigned its site, adding in what it called “News Feeds.” Essentially, what this meant was that anytime anyone signed in to the site, they could see what all their friends had been up to. For instance, if I wrote a comment on someone’s “wall,” all my friends could then see whose wall I had posted on, what time I had posted, and what I had written. Similarly, if I announced that I was now in a relationship, added new photos, joined new groups, anything like that, any of my friends could see it.

Facebook’s users flipped out. Reportedly, 600,000 have joined a group petitioning Facebook to get rid of the news feeds. Everyone, it seemed, was freaked out by just how much information was now available, and how quickly.

To be honest, I didn’t like the new format, and I initially figured most of my friends I saw complaining about it, on Facebook and elsewhere, had the same issue I did: the new format was, well, ugly. Not so — as one user put it, “It’s making it so much easier for people who want to do stalking to stalk. Facebook users really think Facebook is becoming the Big Brother of the Internet recording every single move.”

Ultimately, I think, this comes back to what I’ve said here before, and what I wrote about in this article for Salon.com: my generation has convinced itself that what it posts on the Web, that most public of forums, is somehow private. Because of the reporting I’ve done, I’m aware of the fact that nothing of what we do online really is private. For people who hadn’t yet come to that realization, the truth was suddenly, and literally, staring them in the face.

A mea culpa from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, posted to the home page of the site, follows after the jump. After reading it, I get the feeling that they felt the same way I do — they know, from working in the industry, that there is no privacy in social networking. They must have mistakenly thought their users realized that by now, and would want something like these news feeds. It’s a gigantic misstep; as John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker a few months back, part of the appeal of Facebook (as opposed to MySpace) was that it seemed more private, since it restricted who exactly could view your profile. (The article’s not online, but the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Tech Chronicles” blog discussed that point a little here.) Now that the illusion’s been busted, I notice groups on the site talking about all sorts of Facebook privacy violations — one accuses them of selling user photos to advertisers, for instance. (I tried finding the language the group references to prove Facebook’s doing that, but couldn’t, so I can’t confirm that one way or another.)

My guess is that Facebook’s lost a lot of its users’ trust, and, because it’s an issue of an entire world of illusions shattered, they’ll have a hard time gaining it back. That’s going to be a big problem for them.

An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg:

We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now.

When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we’ve seen is because of these basic principles.

We made the site so that all of our members are a part of smaller networks like schools, companies or regions, so you can only see the profiles of people who are in your networks and your friends. We did this to make sure you could share information with the people you care about. This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings – to give you even more control over who you share your information with.

Somehow we missed this point with News Feed and Mini-Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.

This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.

About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that’s what I believe in – helping people share information with the people they want to share it with. I’d encourage you to check it out to learn more about what guides those of us who make Facebook. Today (Friday, 9/8) at 4pm edt, I will be in that group with a bunch of people from Facebook, and we would love to discuss all of this with you. It would be great to see you there.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Mark