Mark Zuckerberg is in the news again, after publishing an article in today’s Washington Post which supposedly answers growing concerns regarding where Facebook stands on privacy.

“Facebook has been growing quickly. It has become a community of more than 400 million people in just a few years. It’s a challenge to keep that many people satisfied over time, so we move quickly to serve that community with new ways to connect with the social Web and each other. Sometimes we move too fast — and after listening to recent concerns, we’re responding,” said Zuckerberg in the 524-word article.

Some see this as damage control, or almost a near-apology as Zuckerberg goes on to say that, “Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.”

Personally, I see it as a well-crafted post that Zuckerberg wrote to help repair Facebook’s damaged image. There are growing concerns that the biggest social networking site in the world is no longer catering to the user, but rather to the advertisers who invest in it. As this chart shows, Facebook’s default settings have dramatically changed over the years when it comes to protecting our privacy, and we as users are left scratching our heads wondering, why?

Zuckerberg does go on to promise that, “In the coming weeks, we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use. We will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services. We are working hard to make these changes available as soon as possible.”

We’ll have to wait and see just how these changes affect the ability to control privacy on Facebook. With more and more attention being paid to Diaspora*, they’ll have to do something fast, or else Facebook could see a lot of its users jumping ship very soon.