Facebook Can’t Quit You Baby

Facebook faces ongoing and growing scrutiny for its abuses of user privacy, not to mention of the truth. Last week, its CEO said it would explore offering communications tools that were private, secure, and then evaporated after being read or viewed (the quality is called ephemerality).

“It’s a statement of the principles that we think are necessary to build this privacy-focused social platform,” said Mark Zuckerberg in a Wired interview.

No, it’s a ruse, for at least 5 reasons:

First, assuming people can chat as privately as it suggests (or that we users might expect), much if not most of the data on the platform will likely stay public, and certainly remain searchable and exploitable by Facebook. Remember, the privacy issue isn’t about people hiding from one another but rather Facebook monetizing our every visit, click, and post.

Calling its imagined social platform “privacy-focused” is like dubbing a cheeseburger and fries “healthy” because the plate is garnished with an orange slice.

Second, while those private messages might remain private (again, a big if), there’ll still be all that behavioral surplus data associated with them: monitoring when messages are sent, to whom, their length and frequency are only some of the ways Facebook could use those conversations to reach insights that could be monetized. I bet it could even guess what was in the messages if it had enough of them to study.