With increasing usage of social media across the globe, concerns regarding privacy are at its peak. With Facebook owning the majority of social media apps worldwide including Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has put forward his privacy vision where the main focus revolves around user privacy.
He says that he plans to build the platform the way it has developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case — messaging, make it as secure as possible, and then build 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.
He assures that this privacy-focused platform will be built around several principles including Private interactions, End-to-end encryption, Reducing Permanence, Safety, Interoperability, and Secure data storage. Over the next few years, Facebook plans to rebuild more of its services around these ideas. Mark Zuckerberg expects future versions of Messenger and WhatsApp to become the main ways people communicate on the Facebook network. It is focused on making both of these apps faster, simpler, more private and more secure, including with end-to-end encryption.
Facebook says that it wants to give people a choice, so they can reach their friends across these networks from whichever app they prefer. It is planning to start this by making it possible for you to send messages to your contacts using any of the company’s services, and then to extend that interoperability to SMS too. Of course, this would be opt-in and you will be able to keep your accounts separate if you’d like.
Facebook’s CEO said that over the next year and beyond, there are a lot more details and trade offs to work through related to each of these principles. A lot of this work is in the early stages, and it is committed to consulting with experts, advocates, industry partners, and governments including law enforcement and regulators around the world to get these decisions right.