Facebook exec on balancing privacy, business needs

Though Facebook has sometimes been criticized for sacrificing the privacy of its users in order to monetize the service, Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer, has presided over the social network's efforts to build out the most sophisticated privacy options in the industry. On a granular level, Facebook users can now control what bits of information they share with each individual friend, group or network.

Facebook users have taken notice. According to an annual study by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy research firm, Facebook ranks within the top 20 (15th) most trusted companies for privacy as rated by U.S. consumers.

Kelly's job sometimes appears tricky, however. He must ensure that users feel they have control over their information, while weighing that need against Facebook's business model, which relies heavily on a culture of openness and sharing. Here is the full interview CIO conducted with Kelly during our reporting for a special feature on social networks and privacy. Kelly talked about what constitutes Facebook's overall view towards privacy, and how that affects its ability to serve up ads.

CIO: Facebook now has some pretty robust privacy settings. They allow users to determine who can see their profiles, and what bits of content each person can see within those profiles. But the question most people have is, "do people actually use them?"

Kelly: One of the things we've tried to watch is if people under-utilize the controls because they find them too confusing. We also launched friend lists, and we mapped those friend lists to individual privacy settings. We don't have any raw numbers to share, but we're not as satisfied as we'd like to be with how people are using those friend lists to make individual choices about what they share with whom. We'd like to see that be done more effectively, and we're doing some work on that right now.

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