Facebook’s privacy-focused vision

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg released a blog post on a “privacy-focused vision” that centers on:

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.

Be that as it may that this vision can bring business and strategic benefits, meaning that Facebook has a reason to follow suit. Nonetheless, I have nothing, but skepticisms about this vision.

First of all, the majority of Facebook’s revenue comes from ads. By majority, I meant 98.5% of their revenue in 2018 comes from ads

When something is 98.5% of you, any claim that you will do something threatening that 98.5% part tends to raise genuine concerns about its legitimacy.

Second of all, Facebook’s track record on keeping its promise isn’t that great. For the last two years, it will be a hard ask to find a tech company that is involved in more scandals than the blue brand. I came across this disturbing article from Buzzfeed on Facebook. Here is what it has on decision-making at Facebook

Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg do not make judgment calls “until pressure is applied,” said another former employee, who worked with Facebook’s leadership and declined to be named for fear of retribution. “That pressure could come from the press or regulators, but they’re not keen on decision-making until they’re forced to do so.”

Buzzfeed

On Facebook’s attention to privacy

One former employee noted that Facebook’s executives historically only took privacy seriously if problems affected the key metrics of daily active users, which totaled 1.52 billion accounts in December, or monthly active users, which totaled 2.32 billion accounts. Both figures increased by about 9% year-over-year in December.

“If it came down to user privacy or MAU growth, Facebook always chose the latter,” the person said. 

Buzzfeed

On their denial to admit problems:

Other sources told BuzzFeed News that Facebook executives continue to view the problems of 2018 fundamentally as communication issues. They said some insiders among leadership and the rank and file could not understand how Facebook had become the focus of so much public ire and floated the idea that news publications, who had seen their business models decimated by Facebook and Google, had been directed to cover the company in a harsher light.

Buzzfeed

On a new feature called Clear History:

“If you watch the presentation, we really had nothing to show anyone,” said one person, who was close to F8. “Mark just wanted to score some points.”

Still, nine months after its initial announcement, Clear History is nowhere to be found. A Facebook executive conceded in a December interview with Recode that “it’s taking longer than we initially thought” due to issues with how data is stored and processed. 

Buzzfeed

By now, you should see why I am skeptical of Facebook’s new vision. We all have to take a side and so does Facebook. It just happens that taking advertisers side means Facebook is not on ours as users.