Gone is the man who once said, " They 'trust me.' Dumb f--ks," when referring to other people's data. Zuckerberg wants to recast himself and his company as the guardians of privacy. Specifically, this will involve a big lurch towards end-to-end encryption, which will be the backbone of newly interoperable messaging services WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram Direct Messages.
"The future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won't stick around forever. This is the future I hope we will help bring about," he said in his blueprint for Facebook's future.
The problem with Facebooks privacy push
But while Facebook's embrace of encryption may help solve its privacy problem, it could come at a cost. Namely, that it will become much harder to detect the spread of hideous videos like the one of the New Zealand mosque shootings last week, which has drawn international condemnation.
Much of the attention of has focused on the video's spread on the public-facing Facebook the "town square," to use Zuckerberg's parlance. Here, Facebook has removed 1.5 million versions of the footage, with both its AI and moderators creaking under the pressure of its virality.
What about its spread on WhatsApp, Facebook's already encrypted messaging service? Here, only the sender and receiver of a message can view its content, making it impossible for Facebook or law enforcement to detect. This is the Facebook "living room" that Zuckerberg imagines.
"There is just a clear trade-off here when you're building a messaging system between end-to-end encryption, which provides world-class privacy and the strongest security measures on the one hand, but removes some of the signal that you have to detect really terrible things some people try to do, whether its child exploitation or terrorism or extorting people. "
Does Zuckerberg want to wash his hands of toxic content?
"Is this just a way for Facebook to avoid any responsibility for what people share on the platform?" asked Damian Collins, the British lawmaker who has been investigating the Cambridge Analytica scandal for months.
He told Business Insider: "This becomes a charter for spreading disinformation and other harmful content if the platform is basically going to absolve itself of any responsibility to know people are sharing."
Garca Martnez has similar suspicions. "The dedication to encryption is Zuck's move to get out from under the content moderation onus, and simply write off dealing with the issue," he tweeted.
Concerns were also raised by Ben Horowitz, the cofounder of the influential Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Horowitz's partner, Marc Andreessen, is a Facebook board member.
"If a social network is truly private via end-to-end encryption as Mark Zuckerberg specified, nobody including Facebook or the U.S. Government would be able to monitor it for hate speech and other violations. Essentially, Facebook would be flying right into the face of some of the current backlash against them," he said last week.
Zuckerberg has promised to publicly consult with experts around the world, including governments, law enforcement, regulators, and safety advocates, to address these issues. In putting out a fire over privacy, Zuckerberg will need to be careful that he doesn't throw oil over another burning issue.
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