Zuckerberg outlines a more 'privacy-focused' Facebook in strategic post

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a status update – A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking

Facebook has been under fire since it came out in 2018 that Cambridge Analytica used the platform to access tens of millions of users’ data without their knowledge. But that’s not the only scandal, it seems the platform has also been manipulated for political reasons from Russia, Iran to Myanmar. The list is rather long. Fair to say there is a lot of pressure on the company to take responsibility and to address the issues. And that seems to be what this latest post from Zuckerberg is all about.

Notwithstanding its recent troubles, the CEO doesn’t see the impact of social media dwindling anytime soon, which is striking given that Google is in the process of dismantling its social media platform, Google+, and Twitter battles to make tweetphere more conducive.

“Public social networks will continue to be very important in people’s lives — for connecting with everyone you know, discovering new people, ideas and content, and giving people a voice more broadly. People find these valuable every day, and there are still a lot of useful services to build on top of them,” Zuckerberg writes.

However, Facebook would be changing its strategy to focus on privacy. Let us not forget that any proposal will be farreaching and could potentially impact roughly a third of the world’s population. That’s because about 2.7 billion people use Facebook and its services. So, this is huge.

People “want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room,” and less in an online “town square,” and that will affect the future of the company, Zuckerberg writes.

So be prepared to see less sharing focused services on Facebook and Instagram (which is also owned by Facebook) to more private focused services that cannot be seen by anyone else, including by people at the company, because they’d be encrypted. According to Zuckerberg, that’s the trend people are navigating towards. “In a few years, I expect future versions of Messenger and WhatsApp to become the main ways people communicate on the Facebook network,” Zuckerberg says, so one might expect that the changes may not happen overnight.

Facebook also outlined several principles that will guide the transition including things like encryption, interoperability (Facebook owns both Instagram and WhatsApp), performance and safety.

Here they are in Zuckerberg’s own words:

“Private interactions. People should have simple, intimate places where they have clear control over who can communicate with them and confidence that no one else can access what they share.

“Encryption. People’s private communications should be secure. End-to-end encryption prevents anyone — including us — from seeing what people share on our services.

“Reducing Permanence. People should be comfortable being themselves, and should not have to worry about what they share coming back to hurt them later. So we won’t keep messages or stories around for longer than necessary to deliver the service or longer than people want them.

“Safety. People should expect that we will do everything we can to keep them safe on our services within the limits of what’s possible in an encrypted service.

“Interoperability. People should be able to use any of our apps to reach their friends, and they should be able to communicate across networks easily and securely.

“Secure data storage. People should expect that we won’t store sensitive data in countries with weak records on human rights like privacy and freedom of expression in order to protect data from being improperly accessed.”

The full post is here.