Facebook fights back with new privacy controls

Admitting mistakes have been made, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has answered critics with yet another tweak to privacy controls.

Zuckerberg admitted that it's been a "pretty intense two weeks", with engineers camped in a conference room and "working weekends" to improve privacy after a public backlash.

The settings will apply retroactively to older material as well as any new applications or features that show up on the site. In other words, new apps will default to a user's existing privacy settings, so they don't have to keep making decisions about privacy.

Users will be also be able to entirely opt out of the Facebook platform - which connects users to third party systems such as websites and apps - so that none of their data goes off site.

"We really think about the trust issues... a lot of people are upset with us and I take that very seriously," he said, adding that with nearly 500 million users, any move will make someone unhappy.

"Almost 500 million are using the service, if only a few of them are upset, that percentage can still be more people than the state of New York," he said.

Despite the public uproar, Zuckerberg said there had been "no meaningful change" in user numbers, and claimed that more people have posted updates concerned about Facebook starting to charge a fee than about privacy.

Zuckerberg denied that the site was trying to get users to share information for the sake of advertising. "We don't give any information to advertisers... we target all the ads ourselves," he said, describing the idea of selling users' data to advertisers as a "big misconception" and "creepy."