Facebook founder speaks to BBC

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has spoken to the BBC in a rare video interview about the recent concerns surrounding the company's privacy issues.

He said: "The person who's putting the content on Facebook always owns the information... They want to share it with only a few people and it's important that the information only goes to those people."

He added: "We're not going to sell or share the information except with the people that they've asked it to be shared."

Zuckerberg said that the advertising on the site has grown quickly and that is how it will make its money. And would not sell people's information on in order to do so. But to a lesser degree, Facebook is providing demographic information - not personally identifiable, but still personal information nonetheless - to advertisers.

Online advertisements need to be targeted to relevant markets. Let's look at how GMail works, for instance. I know my information remains personal, but the site still scans my emails for keywords and displays relevant advertisements down the site of the page that relate to those keywords. Effectively, my information is still being used for profit. The same thing happens on Facebook but to a greater degree. I've used its ad service, and have managed to narrow down demographics in order to buy targeted ads, and narrow down the number of targeted users by interest, age, relationship status and more.

Like I said, this isn't personally identifiable. But it means that your information is still being used for advertising, whether you like it or not.