Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has outlined a new vision for the company, offering more insight into his plans for Facebook’s messaging services.
In a rare and open article, the director accepted that the company would face challenges, but outlined a transparent vision that put users in control of their data.
“My focus for the last couple of years has been understanding and addressing the biggest challenges facing Facebook,” he said in a post.
“This means taking positions on important issues concerning the future of the internet. In this note, I’ll outline our vision and principles around building a privacy-focused messaging and social networking platform.
“There’s a lot to do here, and we’re committed to working openly and consulting with experts across society as we develop this.”
“Today we already see that private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication,” he added.
“There are a number of reasons for this.
“Many people prefer the intimacy of communicating one-on-one or with just a few friends. People are more cautious about having a permanent record of what they’ve shared. And we all expect to be able to do things like payments privately and securely.”
Accepting Challenges
Zuckerberg was quick to admit the challenges the company has faced in the past year, and that “people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform,” but added that the company has “repeatedly shown” it “can evolve to build services that people want, including in private messaging and stories.”
Facebook will reportedly enable private interactions, allowing users to have ‘intimate places’ where they have control over their content and whether Facebook can access their data, and added that end-to-end encryption will be added to Messenger and Instagram in 2019.
Reducing Permanence
Mark added that he wanted to ‘reduce permanence’ on the platform and that people should not have to worry about the content they published in the past coming back to bite them in the future.
Facebook “won’t keep messages or stories around for longer than necessary to deliver the service or longer than people want them,” Zuckerberg added in the blog post.
Safety was another key element of the post, with Zuckerberg adding that 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,” and that “we don’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.”
Merging Messenger and WhatsApp
He also added more clarity to his plan to merge Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram in the coming years, telling readers that interoperability can help users “communicate across networks easily and securely,” without having to use every Facebook-owned application.
Mark rounded out the blog post, telling Facebook fans that he believes “we should be working towards a world where people can speak privately and live freely knowing that their information will only be seen by who they want to see it and won’t all stick around forever. If we can help move the world in this direction, I will be proud of the difference we’ve made.”
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