The company will introduce new privacy settings for more than 400 million users

"Many people think that our control of privacy is too complicated," says 26-year-old Mr Zuckerberg, who published an article in The Washington Post in Monday. Our goal was to give you a lot of subtle control, but maybe a lot of people didn't want it, and the result backfired.

Zuckerberg promises that in the next few weeks Facebook will add much easier privacy settings. Facebook also provides an easy way for users to shut down all third-party services. It is not clear that these third-party services refer to apps used in-house within Facebook, such as Zynga's games and Playfish, or a stand-alone website that recently began to integrate Facebook data.

Several weeks ago the world's largest Internet social network made a number of changes to services, leading to sharp criticism from privacy advocates and a protest against the deletion of accounts by some Facebook key users such as Jassen Caracanis, a high-tech commentator, Jason Calacanis. One of these features, called instant personalization, automatically prints Facebook users ' profile information to the music website Pandora and the user comment site Yelp.

Another change is forcing Facebook's users to link their personal data, such as education, hobbies and place of origin, to public pages dedicated to those themes. Many of the Byzantine privacy settings that denounce services, one of which is described as complex programming tasks.

Facebook, in California State Palo Alto, is a privately held company that has never disclosed financial data. But analysts estimate its 2009-year income at 500 million to 650 million dollars, mainly from the sale of user-targeted online advertising. Facebook's users are expected to reach 500 million in the next few weeks, compared with just 150 million users in January 2009.

In his article in The Washington Post, Mr. Zuckerberg also pointed out that Facebook will always provide free services to everyone. Donald Graham, chairman of the Washington Post, is also a director of Facebook, Donnald Grahem.