If the Future is Private, the Future Can’t Be Facebook
We will never find privacy on a website designed to extract and exploit our personal information
“The future is private.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently likes these four words — enough, anyway, for them to appear behind him on a gigantic screen as he delivered his keynote address his company’s annual development conference, F8, this week.
Despite believing the opposite not long ago, this so-called pivot to privacy is a theme Zuckerberg’s been working on for a little while. He previewed earlier this year in a lengthy manifesto in which he said “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 won’t stick around forever.”
But Zuckerberg’s newfound verbal commitment to privacy is still at odds with the way his website currently runs. And if privacy is indeed the future, Facebook will have to convince a lot of people that its words actually means something. One of the people who currently disagrees — and is taking Facebook to court over its failure to protect privacy — is Canada’s privacy commissioner.
