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  • - Last year, we found out that for the past three years,

  • Facebook had been deleting the messages

  • of Mark Zuckerberg and some other executives

  • and in the controversy that followed,

  • the company promised that it would then

  • allow all of us to do exactly the same thing.

  • Imagine my surprise this week,

  • when Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was going

  • to lean hard into privacy.

  • It's a lot of talk.

  • It was 3,200 words in a blog post that Zuckerberg wrote.

  • To understand what it all means,

  • we're going to have to look at the big picture.

  • So what did Mark Zuckerberg actually say in his blog post?

  • He said he wanted to bring end to end encryption

  • to all of Facebook's messaging products.

  • That means Facebook Messenger,

  • WhatsApp and Instagram Direct.

  • One of the things that he says in his blog post

  • is that encryption limits services like ours

  • from seeing the content flowing through them

  • and makes it much harder for anyone else

  • to access your information.

  • And once your messages are end to end encrypted,

  • that means that no one from Facebook or the government

  • will ever be able to understand the contents

  • of your messages.

  • The second major thing that was in the blog post

  • was the idea that your messages

  • should no longer be permanent.

  • Zuckerberg speculated that in the future,

  • your messages on Facebook would disappear by default,

  • after a certain period of time.

  • You could choose to keep them if you wanted to

  • but just like on Snapchat,

  • how messages disappear when you read them,

  • if you wanted your Facebook to feel like that,

  • all of a sudden, it could.

  • So with those two ideas out there,

  • Facebook says it is going to rally around privacy

  • in a way that it never has before.

  • If you've read a story about Facebook in the past year,

  • chances are it was about a privacy scandal,

  • whether it was Cambridge Analytica last spring

  • or the biggest data breach in company history last fall.

  • So when Zuckerberg says that privacy is now

  • the most important thing to Facebook,

  • a lot of people are skeptical.

  • But let's say that you believe Zuckerberg,

  • what would that mean for Facebook and the rest of us?

  • Well, one of the things that he says is

  • in the future, we're going to want

  • the world to feel less like a town square

  • and more like a living room,

  • so less yelling in pubic, more talking to your friends.

  • If that's true, it has a lot of

  • big implications for Facebook.

  • Number one, the news feed is no longer the most

  • important part of the site.

  • Think about what a big deal that is.

  • The news feed is synonymous with Facebook.

  • It's by far the biggest money making product at the company.

  • If we're no longer looking at the news feed every day,

  • Facebook is a much different business

  • than it ever has been before.

  • Today, Facebook makes it's money by effectively

  • renting it's users attention to advertisers.

  • In an encrypted messaging app,

  • an advertiser can't see who you are

  • or what you might be interested in,

  • nearly as well as they used to be.

  • Instead, Facebook wants to give businesses

  • an opportunity to let us buy and sell things

  • from within a Messenger or a WhatsApp.

  • There's still a lot of details that need to be worked out.

  • So, in a world where apps are encrypted,

  • not only can advertisers not see into your messages,

  • governments can't as well.

  • If governments can't access the content of user's messages,

  • they're going to have a lot to say about it.

  • We've already seen countries like Vietnam and Russia

  • pass laws requiring companies like Facebook

  • to store any data that Facebook is collecting

  • about their citizens locally,

  • presumably so that they can more easily access that data.

  • Facebook is now saying hey,

  • our apps are gonna be encrypted,

  • there's just not gonna be a lot for you to look into.

  • And Zuckerberg speculates that Facebook is actually

  • going to be banned in these countries.

  • And then there's China.

  • One of Mark Zuckerberg's biggest dreams over the years

  • is that Facebook would become one of the few

  • American companies to really be able to thrive in China.

  • But now that the company is going to

  • enable encrypted messaging, that seems impossible.

  • So encryption has benefits.

  • Advertisers can't target you,

  • governments can't read what you're saying,

  • there are some real drawbacks to conversation

  • moving from the town square to the living room.

  • It's going to be harder to know what people

  • are saying about the politics inside their own country.

  • We've already seen this in Brazil and India,

  • two countries where WhatsApp is very popular.

  • Misinformation has spread rapidly there,

  • inside these closed groups and researchers

  • have had a hard time keeping track of exactly

  • what's being said.

  • So one result of this encryption might be

  • less visibility into the public discussion.

  • It's trade-offs, all the way down.

  • This all may come to nothing, but if it really happens,

  • all of a sudden, Facebook is a very different company.

  • When I say Facebook, you probably think news feed.

  • In the future when I say Facebook,

  • you might think a group text,

  • you might think a small group that you're in

  • and you might never visit the news feed at all.

  • So how do we feel about the newer,

  • more privacy friendly Facebook?

  • Well, privacy has a lot of benefits.

  • There are many of us out there who just wanna talk

  • with our friends and our family and our co-workers,

  • without worrying that whatever we're saying

  • is going to come back to haunt us.

  • The fact that Facebook is enabling a new way of doing that,

  • is pretty exciting.

  • At the same time, Mark Zuckerberg has a history

  • of making grand pronouncements that never come true.

  • Four years ago, he told us the news feed

  • was gonna transform into video.

  • Two years ago, he published a manifesto

  • saying Facebook was going to build social infrastructure,

  • whatever that means, and whether this new,

  • private Facebook comes into being against some

  • very long odds, is still anyone's guess.

  • So what do you think, you all?

  • Are you gonna be more likely to use Facebook

  • once it's end to end encrypted anywhere?

  • Let us know in the comments,

  • and if you want to know way more about Facebook,

  • did you know I write a daily newsletter

  • about social networks and democracy?

  • You can find it at theverge.com/interface.

- Last year, we found out that for the past three years,

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