To open the decade, Mark Zuckerberg defiantly announced that the age of privacy was over. Now, as we approach the decade’s end, the Facebook founder and CEO says he’s rebuilding the world’s biggest social network around privacy first.
To open the decade, Mark Zuckerberg defiantly announced that the age of privacy was over. Now, as we approach the decade’s end, the Facebook founder and CEO says he’s rebuilding the world’s biggest social network around privacy first.
No one really believes Zuckerberg, who laughingly joked about the company’s ever-deteriorating privacy reputation when he took the stage to open Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference in Silicon Valley on Tuesday. Zuckerberg’s message, a continuation of what feels like profoundly disconnected optimism that he’s taken to preaching recently, is that over time Facebook will embrace privacy—and 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’s largest social network, home to democratic movements, and a crucial player in the future of the internet. It’s now attempting to see if it can push that to the forefront and hide its dirty laundry behind a wall of “privacy” talk.
Facebook’s 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’s coming soon), and Instagram. This should mean that neither the company’s employees nor its algorithms will be able to see what’s 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.
“There are real trade-offs between making your messages as secure as possible on the one hand,” Zuckerberg said, “and our ability to prevent people from doing bad things on the other hand. I really care about getting these trade-offs right.”
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’s plans should stop or slow or be undermined or weakened? Will the process have any transparency?
Given Facebook’s track record, color me intensely skeptical.
