Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the future of his company’s product development will be focused on encrypted, private and ephemeral communication.
The world’s largest social networking company will be rebuilding a lot of its features to accomplish those new goals, Zuckerberg wrote on Wednesday in a blog post.
“I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform — because frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we’ve historically focused on tools for more open sharing,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.”
Zuckerberg didn’t explain in the post how the move would affect Facebook’s advertising business. The changes would involve making it possible to send messages between the different properties Facebook owns, including WhatsApp and Instagram, which would make it easier for Facebook to merge the data on users’ identities.
“Of course, this would be opt-in and you will be able to keep your accounts separate if you’d like,” Zuckerberg wrote. — Reported by Sarah Frier, (c) 2019 Bloomberg LP
