Facebook has a long and well-documented history of privacy controversies, which, taken together, have drawn mounting scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators at home and abroad.
Now, co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pledging a major overhaul of the company to orient it around strong privacy protections, encryption, closed communications and content that disappears after a period of time.
"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," Zuckerberg writes in a post on the social network.
If Facebook hews to the course Zuckerberg is outlining, it would be a sharp reversal of the company's longstanding ethos of sharing as a default setting. In his post, Zuckerberg describes Facebook and its Instagram property as having operated as "the digital equivalent of a town square," but that internet users' privacy preferences are changing.
"[P]eople increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room," he writes.
Zuckerberg acknowledges the inevitable skepticism that will greet his announcement, "because frankly we don't currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we've historically focused on tools for more open sharing."
That might be an understatement. Still, Zuckerberg contends that Facebook has been responsive to its 2.3 billion users' preferences, and is promising to reshape the company in the mold of its WhatsApp product, a secure messaging application that serves as a platform for all manner of private services, from video chats to payments and e-commerce.
Zuckerberg outlines a number of principles around which he aims to remake Facebook, including establishing an area for private communications where "no one else can access what they share," online safety, and secure data storage.
"People should expect that we won't store sensitive data in countries with weak records on human rights like privacy and freedom of expression in order to protect data from being improperly accessed," he says.
Zuckerberg also stresses the need for encrypted communications and "reducing permanence," pledging to offer the capability of deleting messages and stories after a certain period to avoid the creation of a permanent digital footprint.
Zuckerberg's embrace of encryption could add to the friction between the tech sector and the law enforcement community, which has argued that end-to-end encryption is an impediment to criminal investigations. Zuckerberg acknowledges the potential for conflict there, and vows to work with various stakeholders as well as other tech firms to try to get it right.
"On balance, I believe working towards implementing end-to-end encryption for all private communications is the right thing to do," he says.
"Messages and calls are some of the most sensitive private conversations people have, and in a world of increasing cyber security threats and heavy-handed government intervention in many countries, people want us to take the extra step to secure their most private data," he adds. "That seems right to me, as long as we take the time to build the appropriate safety systems that stop bad actors as much as we possibly can within the limits of an encrypted service."
Zuckerberg also anticipates that the company's decision not to store users' information in countries with repressive governments with a track record of human rights or privacy violations could result in the service getting blocked in those parts of the world.
"That's a tradeoff we're willing to make," he says. "We do not believe storing people's data in some countries is a secure enough foundation to build such important internet infrastructure on."
