Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sweated profusely as he was quizzed about recent privacy failures on the same stage where Apple CEO Steve Jobs a day earlier was forced to deny his company's Chinese factories were "sweatshops".
During an interview at the D: All Things Digital conference, Zuckerberg, described on the NYTimes.com Bits blog as being "visibly uncomfortable and sweating profusely", defended his company against claims it was forcing users to make more and more information available publicly and to third party websites.
Reuters noted that "Zuckerberg began visibly perspiring, to the point that All Things Digital's Kara Swisher had to ask if he was all right". MarketWatch called it his "Richard Nixon" moment.
The interview comes after the 26-year-old paper billionaire announced changes to simplify Facebook's privacy settings, which was hailed as a big step in the right direction but still criticised for keeping some sharing of personal information opt-out rather than opt-in.
Last month, 30 European countries wrote a letter to Facebook complaining about its privacy settings while 15 consumer groups complained to the US Federal Trade Commission. The Australian Privacy Commissioner, Karen Curtis, is also investigating.
"There have been misperceptions that we are trying to make all information open. That's completely false," he said.
This seems to conflict with a series of changes Facebook has made over the years that automatically made users' information public without their consent.
Zuckerberg dodged questions around the authenticity of leaked chat logs from his Harvard days revealing he called users who trusted him with their information "dumb f---ks".
"When I was 18 or 19 years old, I did a lot of stupid things. I don't want to make an excuse for that. I'm really sorry that I did them," he said.
In the interview at the conference, conducted by The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Zuckerberg pointed to the initial opposition to the now ubiquitous "news feed" in rejecting a suggestion that all Facebook settings should be "opt-in".
"There's some serendipity that can only happen if you are sharing," he said.
Zuckerberg said pushing the boundaries on other aspects of Facebook, such as a new "instant personalisation" feature that automatically shares users' personal data with websites like Pandora and Yelp, was part of what made Facebook such an innovative company.
"Certainly on a day-to-day basis if we didn't disrupt things that would be the easiest way to proceed," Zuckerberg said.
"But we don't believe that if we did that we'd be doing the best thing for us long-term or for the industry."
He said Facebook would continue to make what it believes are the right changes, even if some of them are controversial.
Colin Jacobs, chair of the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, isn't drinking the Facebook kool-aid, saying privacy settings were still "a bit loose" and criticising the instant personalisation feature as being at odds with Facebook's policy of giving users control of their information.
"If Facebook was a country its population would be 20 times larger than Australia's, and Facebook are learning the hard way that a lot of care must be taken with the information of so many citizens," he said.
"We hope Facebook have learned a lesson from the recent outcry, and decide to stay truer to their publicly stated principle of giving users full control over their information."
Zuckerberg said that more than 200,000 websites now use the company's social "plug-ins", which allows Facebook users to click on buttons across the web to show that they "liked" a particular online article or video.
"I don't know if we always get it right," Zuckerberg said. "But my prediction will be that a few years from now, we'll look back and wonder why there was ever this time when all these websites and applications ... weren't personalised in some way."
with Reuters
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