Yesterday (March 6), Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined Facebook’s new “vision and principles around building a privacy-focused messaging and social networking platform.” The essential problem isn’t that they need a new app; rather, they need to reform their existing one.
Rather than acknowledging the elephant in the room—that users are deeply incensed that their privacy continues to be systematically sold by Big Tech, that ongoing security issues stem from Facebook’s inherent and business-critical data-collection and -sharing practices—Zuckerberg pretends that it’s important that he solves, well, a different problem:
But people increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room. As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms. Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks.
It is as if Zuckerberg had been reminded one too many times by his advisers that people really do care, after all, about this pesky privacy issue, which once upon a time he could say with impunity was no longer a “social norm.” Yeah, so maybe he was wrong. Maybe the perennial demands for a right to privacy are not a changeable social norm, after all. Maybe people really do care about their information being controlled by themselves and not by giant corporations and authorities. Yes, Zuck, well spotted. People do care about privacy after all. But he interpreted the general sentiment in the most naive, simple-minded way, and decided that what people were missing were…private chat rooms.
Because people are really upset that they don’t have private chat rooms, apparently. But never fear! Zuck is here to save the day! He’ll make chat rooms, and he’ll make them really, really private! (Well, not really. Not even that, as we’ll see.)
Throughout the 3,200-word piece, there is no explicit acknowledgment that there might be a different way to do more open and public social networking. Nothing about standards and protocols. Nothing about interoperability between independent social media networks.
Zuckerberg also shows no awareness of the real reasons we should care about privacy. No, it’s not just about people being free to have intimate conversations. There’s much more to it than that. It is ultimately about freedom and autonomy. It’s a fundamental right. Like free speech, people who don’t understand it or who want to control us are only too happy to make it conditional on their ultimately arbitrary and power-driven decisions.
Zuck makes much of WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption. It is certainly true that private messaging services should have end-to-end encryption built in, and that, no, not even Facebook should be able to listen in on our private conversations: “End-to-end encryption prevents anyone—including us—from seeing what people share on our services.” Well spotted, indeed! But as we’ll see in a bit, he doesn’t really mean it. Are you surprised?
Does Zuckerberg propose privacy improvements to Facebook itself, the public and semi-public service that Facebook has used to exploit us, to its enormous profit? No, not really. Perhaps this is an oblique and hopeful-sounding reference: “Over the next few years, we plan to rebuild more of our services around these ideas.” Sure. Maybe you will, if you’re still around. We’ll believe it when we see it. But of course we shouldn’t believe any such oblique promises from an arrogant frat boy who deems his users to be “dumb fucks.”
Later in the piece, Zuckerberg tips his hat slightly toward those of us who want to decentralize social media: “End-to-end encryption is an important tool in developing a privacy-focused social network. Encryption is decentralizing—it limits services like ours from seeing the content flowing through them and makes it much harder for anyone else to access your information.”
But soon after repeating this tantalizing offer of real end-to-end encryption, Zuckerberg takes it away:
At the same time, there are real safety concerns to address before we can implement end-to-end encryption across all of our messaging services. Encryption is a powerful tool for privacy, but that includes the privacy of people doing bad things. When billions of people use a service to connect, some of them are going to misuse it for truly terrible things like child exploitation, terrorism, and extortion. We have a responsibility to work with law enforcement and to help prevent these wherever we can. We are working to improve our ability to identify and stop bad actors across our apps by detecting patterns of activity or through other means, even when we can’t see the content of the messages, and we will continue to invest in this work. But we face an inherent tradeoff because we will never find all of the potential harm we do today when our security systems can see the messages themselves.
People who actually know something about how privacy works and why it’s important—you can be one of them, if you read The Art of Invisibility by Kevin Mitnick or Cybersecurity for Beginners by Raef Meeuwisse—will instantly spot a contradiction here. If there is truly end-to-end encryption, then it will be impossible for Facebook “to work with law enforcement and to help prevent these wherever we can.” This is why some politicians and governments simply want to outlaw encryption, which would be a giant step toward totalitarianism, and absolutely insane to boot. Maybe we could make this a teachable moment for Zuck: “Look, dude, you can’t have it both ways. Either you have end-to-end encryption that the authorities cannot (without superheroic efforts) crack, or you give authorities (and yourselves, and expert hackers) a back door that naturally undermines the real privacy (not to mention security) of your network. You can’t have it both ways.”
But no—he wants us to believe that we can. And that he believes that we can.
Truly risible.
The hard, cold fact is that, just as whispered conversations conducted far from prying ears and detection technology, in principle, cannot be monitored, so private conversations online, if they are successfully end-to-end encrypted, cannot be monitored…so long as eavesdroppers don’t have the private keys, and the private keys are strong enough not to be crackable, and…and…and…
Anyway, Zuckerberg has amply demonstrated that he’s learned nothing. Move along, folks—nothing to see here.
The decentralization revolution will proceed as scheduled.
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