Mark Zuckerberg Lays Out His Vision On User Privacy For Tomorrow’s Facebook

• Mark Zuckerberg says it's time to change Facebook's route in user privacy, for real this time. 
• Facebook's boss has presented a detailed plan on his vision and commits to implement it. 
• People are skeptical, as there's no explanation on how Facebook is planning to fundamentally change who they are. 

Facebook-related news has been alternating between hot baths and cold showers recently, with the largest social media platform in the world promising “Clear History” privacy tools on one day, while showing a lack of true responsibility on its user data security on the other. In what seems to be an effort towards a positive direction, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has presented his vision on how the company should handle their users’ data with respect to their privacy and responsibility against the regulations. He claims that the laid out plan is the framework of their future approach in confidentiality and promises absolute commitment to its gradual implementation.

Mark Zuckerberg has presented the following main six principles:

• 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.

So, is Facebook really planning to throw everything that made them strong and powerful out of the window, or they merely delivering more promises that they will not honor? In his post, Zuckerberg fails to mention anything about how the platform’s advertising strategy will be adjusted to this “privacy-focused” plan. While this is an internal matter, of course, adding credibility to the points made in the post can only be achieved through the further explanations and clarifications on the realistic operational context of Facebook for the future.

Right now, Facebook promises no more shenanigans, but they have done this before, and nothing really changed. Maybe the infrastructural merger with WhatsApp and Instagram will give them what they need to stay afloat, combining and correlating data from a wider collecting area, or perhaps it's all smoke and mirrors, and nothing is implemented in the way that we hope and expect.

Can Facebook really change into being something qualitatively different? Share your thoughts and opinion in the comments section beneath, and feel free to do the same on our socials, on Facebook and Twitter.