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Facebook will be rolling out its promised "simplified" privacy controls to its users starting Wednesday, Facebook vice president Chris Cox announced Tuesday.

Cox made the announcement from the stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City.

The venue is hardly surprising and in keeping with Facebook's recent reliance on sympathetic media outlets to combat the backlash against its overweening ambitions and abysmal privacy practices. TechCrunch's founder and head Michael Arrington recently came to the company's defense, chastising the media for being too hard on Mark Zuckerberg.

On Monday, the Washington Post gave the company free space on its Op-Ed page to write a nearly content-free post on how it was listening to users. In fact, the company is promising little to its users and seems set to continue its new practice of turning over user data to third parties without getting prior permission.

Coincidentally, Washington Post publisher Donald Graham is on Facebook's board and is a mentor to Zuckerberg. As Ryan Tate at Valleywag puts it: "An opinion piece in one of the nation's most prestigious newspapers carries more moral authority than a blog post on Facebook.com," and that Graham has been a sort of "press consigliere for the startup founder."

The closest the company has come to apologizing came the day before in a Sunday e-mail from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to the corporate-blogger-for-hire Robert Scoble. In it, Zuckerberg admitted to "making many mistakes." Scoble is notorious for trying to gain as many followers as he can on any social network – and his main complaint about Facebook is that he thinks it should have no privacy at all.

In fact, after getting the e-mail, Scoble put a hand-wringing post entitled When Do You Throw a CEO's Privacy Under the Bus," worrying that publishing the e-mail from his "friend" would ruin his future relationship with Zuckerberg.

Meanwhile, over the weekend, NPR ran two different segments on Facebook's woes (On the Media and All Things Considered) – both of which this reporter participated in – and the company declined to participate. Perhaps that's because when Facebook officials get put on the spot – as the company's public policy head Tim Sparapani was on a radio show last week, the company's arrogance shines through.

For instance, Sparapani called the company's new initiatives an "extraordinary gift to the public," a statement that tech blogger Danny Sullivan called an "extraordinary rewriting of history."

Wired.com asked Facebook to comment on its choice of outlets by e-mail, but the company did not respond.

Update 1:55 Pacific: Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes disputes that Facebook is choosing friendly media outlets:

We approached the Washington Post through the standard process and they agreed to publish Mark’s op-ed. It should be no surprise that the editors were interested in running the commentary, given the recent interest in Facebook by policymakers and others. The Washington Post was an ideal platform to let important audiences know that we've been listening to their concerns and we're responding.

Your assertion that we've relied on sympathetic media outlets is absurd. We work with a broad range of reporters, bloggers, columnists, commentators and others on a daily basis.

Facebook, it seems, knows the value of sharing only with close friends, even if it keeps pushing you abandon that setting in your own profile.

Image: escapedtowisconsin/Flickr*** *

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