"Facebook is a" privacy innovator, "says Guy Who Runs on Facebook

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg likes to suggest that all critics of his global social media empire come from those who are uninformed or malicious. In fact, Facebook really aims to protect the privacy of its users! That's what he said in a Wednesday interview with Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard, CNBC reported.

In the interview, Zuckerberg acknowledges that Facebook's pioneering privacy status is "certainly not the dominant view", which one could characterize it as a euphemism. He argued that Facebook, whose business model is based on collecting enough data about its users, is actually making significant progress in providing secure communications technology to the public:

"Considering Facebook as a privacy innovator is certainly not part of conventional wisdom," said Zuckerberg during the recorded conversation, which was released Wednesday. "But let's go back to the very first thing we did, so that Harvard students could communicate so that they could be badured that their content and information would be shared with people in that community. to communicate things on this scale without it being just public or as small as it was before. "

One of Facebook's biggest controversies over the past year, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, has occurred precisely because the social media giant has let application developers collect large amounts of data on millions of dollars. users without their consent and without their consent. The co-founder of WhatsApp, a subsidiary of Facebook and the secure chat service, and Jan Koum, has left the company, fearing that Zuckerberg and his team plan to dilute its end-to-end encryption to exploit more user data.

Zuckerberg continued:

"When we talk about privacy, I think a lot of questions are often about privacy policies and legal or policy issues," Zuckerberg said. "But I actually think there is another fundamental element: people want tools that allow them to communicate in new contexts. It's also fundamentally about empowering people through privacy, not just not violating privacy.

Recall that Facebook builds secret databases containing user contact information, including items that users have never delivered voluntarily. It also tracks the web activities of people who have logged out of their account and even non-users.

He distributed an application, Onavo, which he presented as a virtual private network, a type of service that ostensibly protects users' web traffic from external control. Instead, Onavo has monitored the devices to send the usage information directly to Facebook. He also paid teens to install an Onavo-type application on their phone so they could track their behavior with almost unlimited permissions.

"All of Facebook's success has been counterintuitive because we have given people new private or semi-private means to communicate things that they would never have had before," he said. declared.

Claiming an idea is "counterintuitive" is a recognized method that actually suggests that it is much smarter and therefore truer than the conclusion, but that is not true. Facebook succeeds because it sells a huge amount of online advertising, a growing and extremely lucrative market. Facebook's share of the US market for digital advertising is expected to reach 22.1% in 2019, according to AdWeek, which is part of a functional duopoly with which it shares Google. He has also been accused of monopolistic behavior and stealing features from imminent competitors to fuel his own growth.

If Facebook's success is based on privacy, then it is curious that the vast majority of its users have no idea how its targeted advertising business works, according to Pew Research Center polls, and just over half stated to be "not very or not at all comfortable". on understanding their behavior and the interests that the platform had gathered.

Be that as it may, it is clear that Facebook and its leaders are frightened by the fall in user confidence surveys – and they are deploying all their best Möbius rhetorical loops and repetitive buzzwords to put the genie back into the bottle . It will not change anything, but at least they are innovating new ways to justify themselves all the time.