The Facebook founder laid out his plan for the next steps how Facebook will evolve with a focus on privacy and data security, and promised more open and transparency in the transition.
March 7, 2019
The Facebook founder laid out his plan for the next steps how Facebook will evolve with a focus on privacy and data security, and promised more open and transparency in the transition.
In a long post published on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg first recognised that going forward, users may prefer more private communication than socialising publicly. He used the analogy of town squares vs. living rooms. To facilitate this, he aims to use the technologies of WhatsApp as the foundation to build the Facebook ecosystem.
Zuckerberg laid out principles for the next steps, including:
Private interactions: this is largely related to users’ control over who they communicate with, safeguarded by measures like group size control and limiting public stories being share;
End-to-end encryption: this is about encrypting messages going through Facebook’s platforms. An interesting point here is that Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook’s security systems can read the content of users messages sent over Messenger. WhatsApp is already implementing end-to-end encryption and is not storing encryption keys, which makes it literally impossible for it share content of communication between individuals with any other third parties including the authorities. Zuckerberg recalled the case of the Facebook’s VP for Latin America being jailed in Brazil to illustrate his point.
Reducing Permanence: this is mainly about giving users the choice to decide how long they like their content (messages, photos, videos, etc.) to be stored, to ensures what they said many years ago would not come back to haunt them.
Safety: Facebook will guard the data safe against malignant attacks
Interoperability: Facebook aims to make its platforms interoperable and may extend to be interoperable with SMS too.
Secure data storage: one of the most important point here is Zuckerberg vowed not to save user data in countries which “have a track record of violating human rights like privacy or freedom of expression”.
To do all these right, Zuckerberg promised, Facebook is committed to “consulting with experts, advocates, industry partners, and governments — including law enforcement and regulators”.
None of these principles are new or surprising, and are an understandable reaction to recent history when Facebook has been battered by scandals of both data leaking and misuse of private data for monetisation purpose. However there are a couple of questions that are not answered:
What changes Facebook needs to make to its business model: in other words, when Facebook limits its own ability to penetrate user data it weakens its value for targeted advertisers. How will it convince the investors this is the right step to take, and how will it to compensate the loss?
Is Facebook finally giving up its plan to re-enter markets like China? Zuckerberg has huffed and puffed over the recent years without bringing down the Great Wall. While his peers in Apple have happily handed over the keys to iCloud and Google has working hard, secretly or not so secretly to re-enter China, how will the capital market react to Facebook’s public statement that “there’s an important difference between providing a service in a country and storing people’s data there”?
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