The Author – Bart Busschots
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Mar
8
So Facebook isn’t Freepi Anymore?
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Security on March 8, 2019 | 1 Comment
A few days ago Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a lengthy post laying out the vision that will be driving his company’s implementation of private messaging going forward. There was a lot to like in that message from a privacy point of view, but the scope was limited — this was not a revolutionary vision for transforming all of Facebook, just for evolving their private messaging offerings.
Big-picture-wise the post laid out six principles that will drive the evolution of private messaging on all Facebook-owned platforms — private interactions, encryption, reducing permanence, safety, interoperability, and secure data storage. Note that the interoperability Zuckerberg describes is between Facebook-owned services, not between Facebook services and services from competitors, so that’s not actually good news from a privacy point of view. This refers to Facebook’s plans to merge private messaging within all its products into a single messaging architecture. This is a privacy loss not a privacy gain, but there is a silver lining — the post promises the merging will be opt-in, and users will be able to choose to keep separate identities on the separate services if they wish. Obviously encryption is good, as is not keeping privately shared stuff for ever.
But, does any of this change the fundamental problem, Facebook’s business model? Nope!
Facebook will continue to make its money by offering users a free service in exchange for their personal information — Facebook remains freepi (and creepy)!