No Zuck, Facebook does not have the best reputation for privacy

OPINION: Last week, Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, used the company's annual conference in Silicon Valley to announce that "the future is private."

In one of the most difficult moments I've ever seen captured in video, he smiled widely while he was trying to joke about the so-called change of direction.

"I know we do not have exactly the strongest reputation for privacy, to put it lightly," he said.

No, Zuck, you do not do it. Wired magazine reports that Facebook is facing more than a dozen international investigations into its past privacy breach, "between its years of willingly dishonest data sharing and several recent data breaches" .

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Zuckerberg seemed to think that his lame line would have cheerful gaffaws. The techie audience, however, did not find it amusing. The reaction was a painful silence accompanied by some induced laughter.

The "pivot to privacy" is simply not credible.

"On privacy, I would say that what Facebook is doing is more of a public relations business," said Roger McNamee, venture capital specialist, to Hanna Kozlowska of Quartz. "(He) tried to give a positive effect to something that they do for business reasons, and would have done it anyway."

The new privacy protection system involves, in part, the unification of various Facebook messaging applications, making it easier for messages to disappear, by encrypting and forwarding communication to smaller groups. Zuckerberg described the latter as moving from a "city square" to "the digital equivalent of the show".

Here's the problem: these changes are just tinkering.

After all, Facebook's business model is based on the opposite of privacy. It essentially gathers the data of its users so that advertisers can target their marketing more effectively.

Although Facebook describes itself in a disgusting way as a place of connection, Facebook is – in its dark heart – all to sell its own users to advertisers.

These privacy changes do not respond to any of this, said McNamee, former Zuckerberg advisor and author of Zucked: wake up to the Facebook disaster.

Of course, Facebook has a multitude of other problems. Because of its immense reach, it should recognize itself as a big media company – a company that must take on the responsibilities of that role. Facebook took a step in that direction last week by banning intruders such as Alex Jones from Infowars on the platform.

Whatever Facebook is, it is a financial giant whose market value exceeds 560 billion US dollars (845 billion New Zealand dollars). This is incredible growth for something that started 15 years ago in the Zuckerberg dormitory at Harvard.

At the moment, Facebook is facing a $ 5 billion potential fine from the Federal Trade Commission for misusing data from its users in the scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm that has been working for President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and obtained access to user data. . (This would be a record fine on the part of the FTC, but far from devastating for the company, given the depth of its pockets.)

Part of this regulation will include the creation of positions within the company to monitor the privacy of users.

And who will be the chief of compliance?

In a rather absurd way, it could be Zuckerberg himself, said Politico last week – the very definition of a conflict of interest.

While government regulators around the world are struggling with what needs to be done, and Facebook is hiding its promises in the form of platitudes, it would be wise for its users to turn to other sources of protection:

To themselves.

Quitting Facebook is a viable option. Personalities such as Cher and Elon Musk, as well as technical journalists, including Walt Mossberg, announced that they were retiring as part of the #DeleteFacebook movement.

Many celebrations followed, but it did not do much. The social network (which also has Instagram and WhatsApp) still has 2 billion users worldwide who find it personally useful or necessary for business purposes.

Unless stopping completely, users can do a lot to limit the ruthless emptiness of the business.

An example: by manipulating Facebook's privacy settings, you can prevent the phone application from constantly tracking your movements and storing this information for years. (Yes, this happens even when you are not actively using the application.)

But you can not accomplish this on the Facebook website, CNBC's Todd Haselton pointed out last week, offering a step-by-step guide to manually disabling it using the phone application.

It is worth checking. I thought I had already considered all the precautions, but I was able to go further and delete all the historical places. It's a little comforting to know that now is what it belongs to: in the digital trash.

Facebook users who choose not to stop everything must take these protective measures.

Because so far, governments around the world have not understood what to do with this gang of digital hackers.

And Facebook – despite its pivot so respected for privacy – can not trust the police itself.