The Great M. Zuckerberg Privacy Con
Encryption is Mark Zuckerberg’s real promise for fake privacy. Whenever M. Zuckerberg declares the terms of the newest deal the public will be getting, it usually has identical core elements: empty promises, more features, and no user rights. Promising disappearing messages and encryption, things even people who understand privacy associate with privacy (and also have actual privacy characteristics), is perfect cover to pull over the eyes of a public that has too limited a technical background to understand what he’s fake doing or real doing.
Zuckerberg isn’t just speaking in another language, he is using that language, and in this case the specific word privacy, to intentionally deceive us. Just two sentences into what looks like a total mission reversal for the world’s largest “open and connected (no matter what happens to any society)” social media publishing company, Zuckerberg draws the same plain speaking analogy our company uses to define real privacy on our platform USpace.
Just like the metaphor for privacy published months ago to our homepage, Zuckerberg’s post draws a metaphor for privacy as an event that happens at a private residence. “People increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room.”
Even the blog title of his big ‘privacy pivot’ uses the language of real privacy like ours to sell his fake privacy. Remove the qualifiers “focused” and “vision” from his March 6, 2019 post title, “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking” and it’s an exact keyword match to our official platform name, “USpace Private Social Network.”
He goes on with lots of word screens like, “For a service to feel private, there must never be any doubt about who you are communicating with,” strongly implying what he is offering in the Facebook family of living rooms is an actual private space for only you and those you trust. (Note: Mark Zuckerberg seems to know he is not someone you want in your living room.)
The reason you don’t want Mark Zuckerberg in your living room is because he is likely the only person you would ever meet who defines the average private living room as a place that includes you, the people you trust, and the majority of Facebook’s data collection apparatus, along with anyone who pays Mark to find out what you’re doing in ‘private.’
Everything in italics is what he omits from his public definition of privacy. This is what is referred to as “lying by omission.”
It is pure deception to describe real privacy while omitting crucial details that reveal what he’s offering is fake privacy. The way Mark dreams things, we are all Native Americans standing on what he will develop into the isles of Manhattan (our digital lives) who don’t speak his language, and he’s got some shiny encryption beads to trade us for our own private Manhattans.
II.
“A confidence trick (synonyms include con, confidence game, confidence scheme, ripoff, scam, and stratagem) is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their confidence, used in the classical sense of trust.” — Wikipedia, March 11, 2019
Here’s what he’s really doing:
While his con is classic Old World, the structure of the Zuckerberg digital fiefdom we actually inhabit is more like The Matrix. Instead of generating electricity for robots of the future, we generate activity to bring to life the Facebook platforms we live on every day. But that just keeps the lights on. The real money is in tracking each hostage (user) and sorting the hostage’s attributes into a gazillion separate data boxes with PROPERTY OF MARK ZUCKERBERG stamped on the side of each one.
You will never see or control the contents of these boxes of information your life created.
To get into the valuable boxes full of your personal life, advertisers pay M. Zuckerberg estates rent over and over and over again. His rental property of you is the total combined activity of your entire life spent on his platforms. He packages and sells all he knows about you, along with access to your various platform feeds on Instagram and Facebook, as a continuously available rental to anyone selling products, services, or political propaganda.
I sometimes refer to him as a Datalord, because he’s exactly like our collective landlord, except the property he rents out is data he owns about your life, not a house or apartment you live in.
Encryption in the future means he won’t be able to see the actual text we write. But just like the current encryption service WhatsApp which all evidence points to him data mining today (to the 850 million dollar disgust of founder Brian Acton), with this new encryption element, Mark will be data mining link clicks, screen swipes, photo and video opens, log on, log off, location, and activity outside the encrypted app on your phone.
Nearly everything but text data will be collected across all platforms using the encryption service. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram will simply continue to capture absolutely everything like they do today.
Over the next two years or more, Zuckerberg has committed to a massive project which is the coding equivalent of building the pyramids. Mark’s One Platform vision spews out each permutation of a single monolithic platform in an identical visual facsimile of what used to be Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, but is actually just a different skin masking the fact each user will now have just one account on the One Platform.
(The analogy to the Borg ship of the Star Trek universe, hellbent on a mission to devour, deculture, and assimilate everything in its path, is too obvious not to mention, so we may as well start calling it “Faceborg” right now. Apparently, someone was rooting for the Borg to win.)
With total integration of these separate platforms, Zuckerberg will take all the data from all his encrypted fake private apps like WhatsApp and connect that private data to your public profiles on Instagram and Facebook (something Facebook — the conglomerate and the platform — already does whenever possible). M. Zuckerberg will then sell your consolidated [real public + fake private] data for advertisers to target you across all platforms where ads can be placed, which will no doubt grow to include digital corners you didn’t even know could exist in the first place.
There is nothing changing about how Facebook and Instagram force you into their forced publishing media environment. That stays as is and in fact becomes more lucrative for Zuckerberg and a more effective targeting environment for advertisers and political propagandists. Hoovering out private data from your activities on WhatsApp and Messenger and other encrypted environments — where you think you are not being monitored — will make targeting your profile on Facebook and Instagram and anywhere else Facebook can push ads all the more profitable. Because he wants you to feel free in fake privacy environments to ‘be yourself,’ we will be giving him even more valuable data to mine from our encrypted fake private activities.
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Read, “4 Reasons Why Social Media Has Become So Toxic and What to Look for Next,” Entrepreneur Magazine, February 22, 2019
Watch the USpace app demo, “How to setup an account + connect with an old friend forever for free on the USpace web app in 3 min” on YouTube at bit.ly/connectin3min
The author runs USpace®, the private social network that uses Advanced Permission Design to prioritize customer ‘right to privacy’ with zero publishing, zero data mining, and zero advertising. USpace runs on Android, iOS, and free online at Unpublished.Space. The web app at Unpublished.Space is mobile optimized to run on any computer, smartphone or tablet. See a demo here.
Any account created on USpace is a lifetime no-fee membership with customer rights written into our Terms of Service. USpace apps have a streamlined design and are naturally an even more secure premium experience.
You can learn about how USpace works with tutorials and more videos at www.tap.space
