Kirkpatrick: Facebook Will Have Privacy Issues 'Indefinitely'

Despite the recent uproar over Facebook's privacy policies, users continue flocking to the site by the millions. In fact, May was one Facebook's strongest months to date, according to comScore.

So is Facebook's privacy controversy overblown? I put that question to David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect.

Despite the fact that "people react to a lot of things that they don't understand very well, especially in the press," Kirkpatrick says, "I don't think it's wrong to be raising the flags and asking a lot of tough questions about how Facebook handles our data. I think Facebook blew it seriously at their April 'F8' [developers conference] event in the way they unveiled a number of new changes to their software."

"They didn't really explain the consequences that had for the user," Kirkpatrick says, "because they were just thinking like geeks: 'Oh this is for the developers.' And in fact there was nothing at F8 for the users, at all. Zero. And that was a big mistake from a communications point of view."

"Their privacy issues are going to be with them indefinitely because we have so much data there," says Kirkpatrick.