To open the decade, Mark Zuckerberg defiantly announced that the age of privacy was over. Now, as we approach the decade\u2019s end, the Facebook founder and CEO says he\u2019s rebuilding the world\u2019s biggest social network around privacy first.<\/b>
\nTo open the decade, Mark Zuckerberg defiantly announced that the age of privacy was over. Now, as we approach the decade\u2019s end, the Facebook founder and CEO says he\u2019s rebuilding the world\u2019s biggest social network around privacy first.
No one really believes Zuckerberg, who laughingly joked about the company\u2019s ever-deteriorating privacy reputation when he took the stage to open Facebook\u2019s annual F8 developer conference in Silicon Valley on Tuesday. Zuckerberg\u2019s message, a continuation of what feels like profoundly disconnected optimism that he\u2019s taken to preaching recently, is that over time Facebook will embrace privacy\u2014and prove that privacy is not completely contrary to what the company is at its core.
The entire event was engineered to help Facebook visibly begin a new chapter, closing out the era in which the social network became virtually synonymous with privacy failures, misinformation, white nationalist political movements, genocide and, well, you get the idea. But it remains the world\u2019s largest social network, home to democratic movements, and a crucial player in the future of the internet. It\u2019s now attempting to see if it can push that to the forefront and hide its dirty laundry behind a wall of \u201cprivacy\u201d talk.
Facebook\u2019s most substantial new move to a privacy-focused future is offering end-to-end encrypted messaging by default across WhatsApp (which already has it), Messenger (Zuck says it\u2019s coming soon), and Instagram. This should mean that neither the company\u2019s employees nor its algorithms will be able to see what\u2019s being said in private messages any longer. Crucially, that process appears to be only at the early stages and will involve a year-long consultation with experts, governments, and law enforcement about how to implement it.
\u201cThere are real trade-offs between making your messages as secure as possible on the one hand,\u201d Zuckerberg said, \u201cand our ability to prevent people from doing bad things on the other hand. I really care about getting these trade-offs right.\u201d
Here would be a good time to take us behind the curtains to answer a host of important questions: Who exactly is being consulted? Where are we in that timeline? What exactly is being discussed? What happens if the FBI, the top law enforcement organization in the United States and one with a long and loud track record of combating and criticizing the spread of encrypted messaging, says Facebook\u2019s plans should stop or slow or be undermined or weakened? Will the process have any transparency?
Given Facebook\u2019s track record, color me intensely skeptical. The company has been hiring rapidly in Silicon Valley and Washington, D. C., over the last year. The technologists, privacy experts, and industry veterans who go into Facebook typically go quiet once they\u2019re inside the company\u2019s black box.
Facebook\u2019s entire business model for the last 15 has been one of surveillance. Even as of the first quarter of this year, $14.9 billion out of its $15.1 billion in revenue came from advertising made valuable by your data. Sure, down at Menlo Park they\u2019d find some more palatable euphemisms to package it all, but ultimately Facebook has made money by watching what you do and then selling what it knows about you. The end result is some kind of pay-for-manipulation: Hopefully, either you\u2019ll buy something, believe something, or at least spend your attention on something long enough to pay off.
Now Facebook says it\u2019s changing dramatically. Inside the room where Zuckerberg announced the redesign, there were cheers for people who you can\u2019t help but imagine are employees and developers who are building products on Facebook\u2019s promise of \u201cconnecting\u201d with \u201cusers\u201d in a \u201cpersonalized\u201d way. Everywhere else, people felt dizzy with skepticism and bewilderment.
Just moments after Zuck delivered his privacy pronouncements and walked off stage, the director of Messenger\u2019s consumer products team, Asha Sharma, said that \u201cbusinesses will learn about their customers in a personalized way at scale.\u201d
That certainly doesn\u2019t sound like much has changed. Add whiplash to the list of common reactions to this year\u2019s F8. How are they learning more if privacy is the new focus?
Buried below all the new product announcements made this year\u2014New colors! New ways to buy things! New ways to get dates!\u2014was Zuckerberg\u2019s silence on previously announced privacy initiatives, and one in particular.
A year ago, at 2018’s F8, the company announced a \u201cclear history\u201d function that would give its users more control over data and address some key concerns about a company that\u2019s building a cache of personal data so large as to be unknowable. Zuckerberg talked at times this year about the importance of \u201creduced permanence\u201d to Facebook\u2019s future, but he said nothing about \u201cclear history,\u201d a feature that would go a long way to handing over the keys to privacy to the user.
This year\u2019s F8 promised the biggest Facebook redesign in half a decade plus a fundamental shift in how the company thinks about what it builds. It\u2019s a reaction to three years of intense ongoing privacy scandals plus over a decade of boiling criticism against the social network.
The company\u2019s founder said that Groups will be centered in Facebook\u2019s redesign, a refocusing that brings to the foreground the tension inherent in what Facebook is trying to do: If groups become more private, how will they deal with misinformation, hackers, criminals and spammers that have made Facebook groups such fertile ground for abuse?
Like most of what we saw on Tuesday, the announcement was packaged as a promise but left observers with more questions than answers.
\u201cPrivacy is the future\u201d sounds big, end-to-end encrypted messaging by default would be significant. But Facebook still tracks your physical location all the time, still follows you around on the internet, still ultimately makes money from capturing your attention and hopefully your wallet at the expense of all else. So while big proclamations about the future make for great marketing, the fact is that even if all these promises are fulfilled, Facebook\u2019s next version is going to be an awful lot like the last one.
During the climactic opening moment his keynote address, Zuckerberg\u2019s declared that \u201cthe future is private\u201d as the words towered over the 34-year-old on an enormous screen, giving it a 1984 feel that seems so common in tech product launches these days. Tuesday\u2019s ultra-Silicon Valley sales pitch fit into the tradition perfectly: War is peace, freedom is slavery, Facebook is privacy.
The extent to which Zuckerberg can take those two from obvious contradictions to at least somewhat compatible ideas is being framed as the biggest challenge the young CEO has ever faced. Or maybe it\u2019s just a timely marketing push. Like almost everything else from Zuckerberg\u2019s big speech, that\u2019s just another question we don\u2019t have the answer to yet.<\/p>\n