After years of being put on the spot for failure of securing users’ data on his social networks, Mark Zuckerbag has finally bowed to pressure.
The Facebook CEO on Wednesday announced his new “vision” for social networking.
“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,” he wrote in a blog post.
“Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks.”
Zuckerbag mentioned the introduction of messaging services for its three apps: WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.
This new messaging service will be built with privacy in mind, Zuckerberg said, with a focus on features such as end-to-end encryption and ephemerality, which is automatically deleting messages after a certain period of time.
Zuckerberg, who has time and again been grilled by commoners, politicians and key technology experts, showed himself to at least be aware of the challenge Facebook will face to be taken seriously by privacy experts.
“I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform – 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,” he wrote. “But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories,” he said.