Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter on a ‘Privacy Focused Future’ Will Not Rectify the Issues Facebook Has Created for Society
Three years after Cambridge Analytica and the Donald Trump campaign milked the data of millions of Facebook users for electoral insights that exacerbated America’s political divisions and intensified the rhetoric and vitriol, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has finally released the company’s official strategy for addressing users’ myriad concerns.
Despite the contrite and forward-looking tone of the letter, Zuckerberg fails to take any of Facebook’s numerous informed critics seriously. The letter falls short of honestly addressing the issues created by Facebook’s social media product suite. Instead, Zuckerberg is trying to divert public attention to problems that sound mildly similar like privacy and data security by coming up with technical solution to problems the company has already solved, like end-to-end encryption, data permanence, and product integration. Even a cursory look at Facebook’s new strategy is mostly an attempt to distract from the problems they’ve created for society.
By now, Facebook’s issues are clear. For nearly a decade, Facebook has squeezed valuable insights from people’s behavior, which it then packages into products for advertisers, brand managers, political campaigns, and foreign operatives. Instagram has instigated psycho-social anxiety and addictive behavior by commoditizing attention, randomizing rewards, and convincing us all we should strive for curated perfection. The algorithmic Newsfeed has created echo chambers and feedback loops that prioritize outrage over thought and push fake news and eye-catching headlines to the top of users’ news feeds. Facebook and WhatsApp have instigated sectarian murder and genocide in countries like Myanmar, the Philippines, and India. And in the United States, it’s created a divisive political climate and that’s allowed demagoguery and authoritarianism to threaten the core of Western Democracy.
But instead of directly addressing these issues, Zuckerberg nebulously says Facebook will focus on ‘user privacy’. His solutions, after years of reflection are prioritizing private interactions, solving encryption and safety, rethinking data permeance, facilitating interoperability, and ensuring secure storage. Zuckerberg says Facebook will use these tenants to drive improvements in the its platform and related ecosystems (including Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram) to allow users to protect themselves and their data. He leads of his essay with:
Over the last 15 years, Facebook and Instagram have helped people connect with friends, communities, and interests in the digital equivalent of a town square. But people increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room… I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever.
User privacy is a noble goal that Facebook should pursue to maintain user’s trust. Users should be in control of their data; when it’s shared or stored, it should be encrypted, and users should be able to identify which social circles they want to share data in. But none of these tenets will address the current issues the social networking company has.
Facebook has already solved its encryption problem. All communication on WhatsApp is already end-to-end encrypted — and Messenger allows users to turn it on. All data is already securely stored in politically-stable countries that value the rule of law and won’t strong-arm Facebook into handing over user’s sensitive information. Additionally, allowing users to configure their communication to automatically expire does nothing to tackle the fake news echo chambers, commoditization of attention, or violence against minorities.
The great shift in Facebook’s strategy would come from prioritizing private interactions. In the past Facebook and Instagram excelled at allowing users to broadcast a message to hundreds of friends of thousands of followers. In his letter, Zuckerberg claims that by allowing users to distribute different pieces of content amongst smaller and more curated sets of friends, Facebook can create safer spaces where users will feel more comfortably share in smaller, more intimate settings.
But we’ve already seen how close knit digital messaging can produce destructive consequences for religious tolerance and multicultural ethics. In the United States, private Facebook groups perpetuate xenophobic and nationalist rhetoric ginning up anti-immigrant, anti-black, and anti-queer agendas. Similarly in India, WhatsApp is a breeding ground for nationalism and religious fanaticism that advocates for violence against Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Hindus in India.
Instead of appropriately dealing with the fallout from Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has chosen ignore the issues the Facebook ecosystem has created for the world and lure America and the international community into a bait and switch. In fact, if Facebook wants to seriously tackle the core issues it needs to fundamentally re-write its business model — one that is antithetical to privacy, personal health, and social freedom. Selling users’ attention and behavior insights to advertiser will always prioritize surveillance and data collection. Additionally seamlessly integrating private messaging in WhatsApp, Direct Message on Instagram, or SMS (what Zuckerberg referred to as Interoperability) will only increase Facebook’s monopolization of digital communication by improving its network effects. In the end, Facebook is still selling one thing: us. Until Zuckerberg’s ready to change his core business model, everything else is just a sham.