Last week, Mark Zuckerberg defined a new direction for Facebook in a blog post. He talked about the company moving away from public conversations to focus on private chats.
It turns out, as a lot of people expected, this was a blatant lie to appeal to users' goodwill.
"I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won't stick around forever," Zuckerberg wrote in the post.
And yet, despite this supposed focus on encryption and user privacy, it seems Facebook has been fighting laws in the EU that would serve to protect just that. Documents obtained by the Sunday Telegraph show that Facebook's global affairs head Nick Clegg has been lobbying EU politicians to block privacy laws. These are laws that would give users tighter control over the data companies could hope to glean from private messages.
Also Read:?Mark Zuckerberg Says Facebook Is Now All About Privacy, But Why Should We Trust Him At All?
According to the report, minutes from a meeting in January between Clegg and the VP of the European Commission Andrus Ansip show that the Facebook executive voiced concerns that the regulation being considered would hurt the company's revenue streams.
According to Zuckerberg's post last week, the encryption Facebook is planning for its messengers will stop Facebook from seeing the messages you send, but still let them monetise your data like who you communicate with and how often. The new EU laws however, would block even that, and Facebook doesn't like that.
At the end of the day, the social media giant and its CEO haven't grown a conscience all of a sudden. Zuckerberg is simply following the general user trend; people are shying away from shouting into the town square and are instead moving to private chats. And Facebook, as usual, is just trying to get a piece of that sweet cash money pie.