Facebook hires former Clinton press secretary Lockhart

By Geoff Duncan June 15, 2011

Joe Lockhart & President Clinton — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Facebook has hired former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart as the company’s vice president of global communications. Lockhart, 51, is best known for having served as press secretary to President Clinton during the era of his impeachment trail from 1998 to 200; Lockhart will move to California from Washington DC to take on his new role in mid-July.

Bringing Lockhart on board is just the latest in a string of Washington insiders Facebook has hired in an apparent effort to make the company savvier at negotiating the relationships and nuances of federal regulation and politics. Facebook recently hired two former aides of President George W. Bush as lobbyists—former Bush deputy chief of staff Joel Kaplan is the company’s VP of policy in Washington—and industry reports had the social networking giant approaching former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs about a position.

Lockhart founded the communications firm the Glover Park Group, and served as a broadcast journalists on Sky TV, NBC, and CNN.

Facebook has faced repeated criticism over privacy mis-steps, ranging from overly-complicated settings, sharing users’ personal data with advertisers to (more recently) automating face-detection in photos. Facebook’s approach to privacy has almost always been to automatically enable data sharing features for all its users, only enabling them to opt out at a later time—as a result, the company has become a big target of public policy officials and consumer advocates. With the company preparing to float an initial public offering, Facebook is apparently gearing up its Washington staff to make sure the company’s concerns and operations are represented to lawmakers and regulators in the best possible light.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Facebook

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Social Media

Facebook teaches us all how web privacy works with Messenger Kids

facebook messenger kids privacy education how your info is used 1

Facebook -- the network that paid a $5 billion fine over privacy violations last summer -- wants to help teach kids about the lack of privacy on the internet. In a slew of new features to Messenger Kids, Facebook is launching a tool that uses simple, kid-friendly language to detail how user information is used. While Facebook is hardly a role model on user data, the rundown on data use is, frankly, something some adults could use, too.

Facebook says the in-app tool aims to inform kids on what types of information others can see about them -- which is more restricted in Messenger Kids than any other Facebook-owned app. The in-app tool reminds kids that names and photos are visible to other people, parents can see messages, messages can’t be deleted, and Facebook saves user information.

News

The Off-Facebook Activity tool lets you take control of your shared data

fbi wants social media data facebook app mem2

Facebook is hoping to be more transparent about your data and activity by expanding a new privacy feature to the U.S. and the rest of the world.

The new feature is called the Off-Facebook Activity tool, which was previously only available to people in Spain, Ireland, and South Korea. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the worldwide feature rollout on Tuesday, January 28, which is appropriately Data Privacy Day.

News

Facebook will protect your data — as long as no one’s paying them for it

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaking on a panel at the Paley Center for Media

At a Capitol Hill hearing Tuesday — no, not the one with the impeachment and such — Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) asked Jay Sullivan, Facebook’s product management director for privacy and integrity in Messenger, whether Facebook collected any data from its Messenger Kids app. It was the exact same question, Durbin said, that he had posed to Mark Zuckerberg last year, when he received an answer he deemed unsatisfactory.

“I have significant concerns that the data gathered by this app might be used or sold,” Durbin told Sullivan. “[Zuckerberg] responded, ‘in general, that data is not going to be shared with third parties.’ I said his use of that terms was ‘provocative and worrisome.'” Durbin then asked Sullivan the same question. “Is your answer that there is no information collected via Messenger Kids that is shared by Facebook to any third parties?”