Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg stood on stage Tuesday at the company\u2019s annual F8 conference in San Jose, California, in front of a giant screen sharing a simple message: \u201cThe future is private.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zuckerberg spent most of his speech talking about Facebook\u2019s commitment to a privacy-focused future, which will include more ephemeral posts, small-group activity rather than public sharing, and encryption for Facebook\u2019s messaging apps.<\/p>\n
But there was an easy way Facebook could have shown its commitment to privacy that would have saved Zuckerberg some time: by rolling out \u201cClear History,\u201d a feature Facebook promised a year ago that will let people disassociate their internet-browsing histories from their Facebook profiles.<\/p>\n
Clear History was first announced at last year\u2019s F8, the company\u2019s event for developers and partners, in response to an outcry about data collection and privacy lapses on its sites. The tool still hasn\u2019t been launched, and it wasn\u2019t mentioned Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Late last year, Facebook admitted that Clear History is taking longer than expected — it turns out that browsing data, which the company uses to help send more targeted advertising to users on its social platforms — is more deeply ingrained into Facebook\u2019s systems than anyone realized.<\/p>\n
Simply finding and deleting the correct data without disrupting Facebook\u2019s advertising and analytics businesses has been a big enough challenge that the product hasn\u2019t gotten off the ground, although the company said earlier this month that the feature will debut this fall.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s going to take time,\u201d Zuckerberg said of Facebook\u2019s privacy-focused future. \u201cI\u2019m sure we\u2019re going to keep on unearthing old issues for a while, so it may feel like we\u2019re not making progress at first. But I think that we\u2019ve shown, time and again as a company, that we can do what it takes to evolve and build the products that people want.\u201d<\/p>\n
To be sure, these are challenging problems to unravel. Facebook\u2019s business was built on harvesting detailed user data to show people precisely targeted ads — not the kind of thing you simply undo overnight. Still, some privacy experts argue that the new announcements are little more than a veneer to assuage consumers, while changing little about its core business model.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of the focus is on changing the way that consumer-to-consumer interaction works,\u201d said Greg Sparrow, senior vice president and general manager at CompliancePoint, a data privacy and security consultancy. \u201cWhile that is laudable and it\u2019s great that they\u2019re doing that, but fundamentally it doesn\u2019t address the problem on the back-end side, which is businesses gaining access to this information and how they\u2019re using it from a data monetization perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zuckerberg\u2019s privacy push also led to a redesign of the company\u2019s main social network, unveiled at F8, to focus on groups and communities — a shift from the open-sharing model he built the company around. The irony wasn\u2019t lost on Zuckerberg.<\/p>\n
\u201cI get that a lot of people aren\u2019t sure that we\u2019re serious about this,\u201d Zuckerberg said. \u201cI know that we don\u2019t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly. But I\u2019m committed to doing this well, and to starting a new chapter for our products.\u201d<\/p>\n
End-to-end encryption of messaging products means that Facebook and other businesses won\u2019t be able to access the content of those messages, but some analysts say that chat content isn\u2019t valuable for advertising targeting anyway. Secure messaging is also difficult to implement, and \u201cthere are a lot of places where the company could deliver something that does not live up to end-to-end encryption\u2019s security and privacy guarantees,\u201d said Gennie Gebhart, associate director of research at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.<\/p>\n
At the same time, Facebook\u2019s efforts to integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger increases the value of the data the company has on users because it gleans more data points on each person.<\/p>\n
\u201cData in those chat messengers is not as valuable as the demographic and behavioral information they collect based on how users interact with the platform,\u201d Sparrow said. \u201cThey\u2019re still going to monetize and have the same business model that they\u2019ve had for a decade.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last year Facebook said it would investigate partners and conduct audits of any app with suspicious activity.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe API access and the data that potential partners can get access to has continued to shrink a little bit,\u201d Ime Archibong, Facebook\u2019s vice president of partnerships said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. \u201cWe\u2019re at this place where the foundation is robust and strong and is more secure than has been ever before.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe future is private.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":290406,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[161,1767],"class_list":["post-304792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-facebook","tag-mark-zuckerberg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304792"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304792\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}