Facebook kicked off F8 2019 by pledging a new privacy-focused social network. Those claims could be believable this time, but for different reasons.
“I know that we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly,” said Mark Zuckerberg from the F8 2019 stage. He was attempting levity, but the joke didn’t land, because it was true but not funny. However, the new and improved Facebook — the company and the site and the associated apps under the Facebook umbrella — are now all about privacy. Zuckerberg swears.
The opening few minutes from Zuckerberg’s keynote on the F8 stage were essentially a rehash of his March blog post in which he espoused his “privacy-focused vision for social networking.” The new Big Idea is that whereas in the past we consumers have thrived on a digital town square, increasingly we crave a digital living room. And that new, smaller, more intimate, more privacy-focused space is driven more by messaging than by Facebook Pages or the News Feed.
In the blog post, and from the F8 stage, Zuckerberg listed six core principles around which the company will build this new privacy-focused social network. They are:
They all sound great. End-to-end message encryption is a must have, to protect data from even Facebook’s prying eyes; the temporary nature of messages gives people more confidence that encrypted transmissions can’t be hacked later on; and so on. But much of this seems to merely describe what’s already present in WhatsApp.
