Mar 6, 2019 - Technology

Zuckerberg outlines plan to pivot Facebook to "privacy-focused" platform

Shannon Vavra

Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday in a 3,000-word note that Facebook plans to rebuild its services around several privacy-focused principles: "private interactions," "encryption," "reducing permanence," "safety," "interoperability" and "secure data storage."

The big picture: Zuckerberg’s note reflects how Facebook finds itself perpetually on the defensive over privacy issues. The social giant’s reputation has spiraled since last year, when reporters exposed the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Facebook was hit with its first major data breach, according to a Harris Poll survey produced in partnership with Axios.

Zuckerberg also said that Facebook is working to make messages interoperable between WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, as Axios has reported previously.

"I believe 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 and content won't stick around forever. This is the future I hope we will help bring about.

We plan to build this the way we've 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."

Go deeper: Privacy concerns push people to private, group-based platforms

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Zuckerberg outlines plan to pivot Facebook to "privacy-focused" platform

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