Facebook targets living room

Facebook is kind of evil and I should really abandon it, except for one thing: I love our family chat group on Facebook Messenger. No matter where in the world, city or sometimes same house any of us happen to be, we stay in touch on everything from emergency hospital admissions to rehashing those classic dad jokes.

Messenger is better than texting, even though tapping the message out on a mobile phone is just the same as texting. You can include pictures, Gifs of cats playing the piano and, unlike texts, the message rarely, if ever, fails.

Whereas with Facebook, apart from wanting the world to know that I’m learning to play the tuba, the main reason for staying is Messenger.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appears to have noticed this. In a 3000-plus word treatise last week, he described the next phase of the social media behemoth’s development as based on private, fully encrypted messages.

‘‘Facebook and Instagram and the digital equivalent of the town square will always be important,’’ Zuckerberg told Wired magazine after publishing his latest essay.

‘‘It’s just that people sometimes want to interact in a town square, and sometimes they want to interact in the living room, and I think that’s the next big frontier.’’

Couched in the language of proconsumer privacy, Zuckerberg accepts it’s not clear how advertisers will worm their way into messages that are meant to be completely private.

But he insists that Facebook has never worried about how it’s going to monetise the products it builds. Instead, the company builds things people use and worries about milking the audience only once it exists.

So, for now, it’s unclear whether and how advertisers will get access to the data flowing through all these fully encrypted messages.

Part of the answer may lie elsewhere. WhatsApp, for example, is also owned by Facebook and already offers encrypted messaging.

Part of the latest play may be about combining the audiences Facebook already owns on its original platform, Messenger, WhatsApp and its other big property, Instagram.

Zuckerberg’s critics see the new strategy as a creature of necessity.

Facebook may have two billion regular users, but that crowd has stopped growing and, in key markets such as the United States, has gone into reverse.

People are tiring of the town square and preferring the living room, so to the living room the Zuckerberg empire must go.

Meanwhile, governments everywhere are pondering not only how to regulate the toxic impacts of much social media traffic, but also the anticompetitive dominance that a few borderless tech firms have achieved in global markets for Internet search and online sociability.

Facebook and its spin-offs are therefore caught between growing scrutiny of their social and political impact, bubbling impatience with their unwillingness to pay tax in most of the countries where they operate, and the enormous commercial opportunity in becoming integral to individuals’ most intimate everyday existence.

There are nods here to the ubiquitous Chinese social media giant, WeChat, whose combination of both social media and banking services has made it a vehicle for social control in a country that is becoming increasingly autocratic.

From where Zuckerberg sits, however, the merging of social media and the banking system – which requires high quality privacy and encryption – is not only an area in which Western consumers are slipping behind their Chinese counterparts, but a glittering unclaimed prize. – BusinessDesk