How Facebook will benefit from its new ‘privacy’ focus
WASHINGTON: At first glance, Mark Zuckerberg’s new “privacy-focused vision” for Facebook looks like a transformative mission statement from a CEO under pressure to reverse years of battering over its surveillance practices and privacy failures.
But critics say the announcement obscures Facebook’s deeper motivations - to expand lucrative new commercial services, continue monopolising the attention of users, develop new data sources to track people and frustrate regulators who might be eyeing a break-up of the socialmedia behemoth.
“Facebook wants to be the operating system of our lives,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of media studies at the University of Virginia.
Zuckerberg’s plan, outlined Wednesday, expands Facebook’s commitment to private messaging, in sharp contrast with his traditional focus on public sharing.
Facebook would combine its instant-messaging services WhatsApp and Instagram Direct with its core Messenger app so that users of one could message people on the others, and would expand the use of encrypted messaging to keep outsiders - including Facebook - from reading the messages.
The plan also calls for using those messaging services to expand Facebook’s role in e-commerce and payments.
A Facebook spokesperson later said it was too early to answer detailed questions about the company’s messaging plans.
Vaidhyanathan said Zuckerberg wants people to abandon competing, person-to-person forms of communication such as email, texting and Apple’s iMessage in order to “do everything through a Facebook product.”
The end goal could be transform Facebook into a service like the Chinese app WeChat , which has 1.1 billion users and includes the world’s most popular personto-person online payment system.
Combining the three messaging services could allow Facebook build more complete data profiles on all its users.