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 monopolizing the attention of users, develop new data sources to track people and frustrate regulators who might be eyeing a breakup of the social-media 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 transform
Facebook into a service like the Chinese app WeChat, which has 1.1 billion users
and includes the world's most popular person-to-person online payment system.But
Zuckerberg said nothing in the Wednesday blog post about reforming privacy
practices in its core business, which remains hungry for data.
A recent Wall Street Journal report found that Facebook was still collecting personal
information from apps such as user heart rates and when women ovulate. "Until
Facebook actually fixes its core privacy issues and especially given their history it's
difficult to take the pivot to privacy seriously," said Justin Brookman, who was a
research director at the Federal Trade Commission before joining Consumers Union
as privacy and technology chief in 2017. Combining the three messaging services
could allow Facebook which today has 15 million fewer U.S. users than in 2017,
according to Edison Research build more complete data profiles on all its users.
