Zuckerberg promises a privacy-friendly Facebook, sort of
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook, which grew by vacuuming up your information and using it to target ads back at you, now says its future lies in privacy-oriented messaging.
Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO, announced the shift in a Wednesday blog post apparently intended to blunt both criticism of the company's data handling and potential antitrust action.
Going forward, he said, Facebook will emphasize giving people ways to communicate in truly private fashion, with their thoughts and pictures shielded by encryption in ways that Facebook itself can't read.
But Zuckerberg didn't suggest any changes to Facebook's core newsfeed-and-groups-based service, or to Instagram's social network, currently the fastest growing part of the company. Facebook pulls in gargantuan profits by selling ads targeted using the information it amasses on its users and others they know.
“All indications that Facebook and Instagram will continue growing and be increasingly important,” Zuckerberg said in an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press.
Critics aren't convinced Zuckerberg is committed to meaningful change.
“This does nothing to address the ad targeting and information collection about individuals,” said Jen King, director of consumer privacy at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. “It's great for your relationship with other people. It doesn't do anything for your relationship with Facebook itself.”
Facebook's new orientation follows a two-year battering over revelations of its leaky privacy controls. That included the sharing of personal information from as many as 87 million users with a political data-mining firm that worked for the 2016 Trump campaign.
Since the 2016 election, Facebook has also taken flak for the way Russian agents used its service to target U.S. voters with divisive messages and being a conduit for political misinformation. Zuckerberg faced two days of congressional questions over these and other subjects last April; he acknowledged and apologized for Facebook's past privacy breakdowns.
Since then, Facebook has suffered other privacy lapses that have amplified the calls for regulations that would hold companies accountable when they expose their users' information.
As part of his effort to make amends, Zuckerberg plans to stitch together its Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram messaging services so users will be able to contact each other across all of the apps.
Critics have raised another possible motive — the threat of antitrust crackdowns. Integration could make it much more difficult to later separate out Instagram and WhatsApp as separate companies. “I see that as the goal of this entire thing,” said Blake Reid, a University of Colorado law professor who specializes in technology and policy. He said Facebook could tell antitrust authorities that WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger are tied so tightly together that it couldn't unwind them.
Combining the three services also lets Facebook build more complete data profiles on all of its users. Already, businesses can already target Facebook and Instagram users with the same ad campaign, and ads are likely coming to WhatsApp eventually.
