Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has outlined new principles for the social network, stressing a focus on privacy following the scandals plaguing the company in the past year over unauthorised sharing of personal data of Facebook users. To help protect privacy, the company will provide encrypted communications and ensure data is not kept in unsafe jurisdictions or any longer than necessary. It will also open up its apps to more interoperability, so users can communicate across its networks.
Zuckerberg admitted that "we don't currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services", and the company has to date "focused on tools for more open sharing". However, Facebook has a record of showing it can evolve "to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories", the CEO said.
Zuckerberg said he sees the future of communication shifting to private, encrypted services, and the company plans to build on WhatsApp's progress in this area to extend such features to its other services. This means a focus on the most fundamental private use case, messaging, and then building more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and "ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services".
WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are expected to become the main ways people communicate on the Facebook network, Zuckerberg said, and the company will focus on making both of these apps "faster, simpler, more private and more secure, including with end-to-end encryption". It will then add more ways to interact privately with friends, groups, and businesses.
Zuckerberg also confirmed plans to make it possible to send messages across Facebook's different apps, including Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. The interoperability also will reach SMS in future, which users will have to opt in for.
The CEO's other principles include reducing permanence, so users don't have to worry about what they share coming back to hurt them later. He pledged that the company "won't keep messages or stories around for longer than necessary to deliver the service or longer than people want them". In addition, it won'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.
