Sectors: Media

Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old founder of social networking giant Facebook, says the site plans to attract one billion users within the next few years.

The Harvard graduate behind Facebook, which has 500 million users worldwide and is rumoured to have generated revenues of $800 million last year, outlined his plans at the recent Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. There, the young billionaire identified only four countries where his company is not already the leading social networking site – Russia, China, Korea and Japan.

Facebook has had a controversial time of it lately, having to deal with concerns over the privacy of users following a change in its policy that led to large numbers of users threatening to quit the website. In the end, Facebook amended its privacy policy, but it has also faced criticism from campaign groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which recently wrote an open letter highlighting key areas of its privacy policy that need to be altered.

Zuckerberg also recently visited David Cameron during an event organised by Facebook in London, with the two having a chat about digital technology. The coalition leader seems to have made a good impression on the young billionaire, who said Cameron ‘seemed very insightful’. He added, ‘A lot of the stuff we talked about was to do with opening up government data.’ Hopefully, Cameron will think carefully before adopting some of the Facebook founder’s ideas on privacy.