Facebook Focusing on Privacy is like McDonald's Focusing on Healthy?Food

Last week I was skimming through Youtube when I laid my eyes upon this, the thumbnail for the Facebook F8 2019 (an annual conference intended for developers and entrepreneurs)

For the next 2 hours, I was in a state of wonderment. I watched the whole video (2 times actually)

I couldn’t believe what I watched! It felt like attending a well groomed manifesto speech by  Joseph Goebbels, the father of propaganda.

In the first 5 mins of the speech, the word privacy was said 15 times!

And it’s not just Mark, the persuasion and deceitful anchoring (as Mark said, Mark talked about..etc) continued as the rest of the speakers graciously brainwashed the audience.

This was just a snippet that shows 5% of the actual speech..

You can watch the whole video here: F8 2019 Keynote

Flashback: How did the Future look like in 2016?

Two years ago in F8 2016, Mark laid the 10-year roadmap for Facebook...

I downloaded the full speech transcript and then searched for the word “privacy” and its synonyms.

To my surprise, I only found two results for the word privacy in the whole speech of 2016!

I broadened my search and downloaded the F8 speech transcripts for 2017, 2018, 2019 and ran the stats.

What happened in 2018?

In the 2016 and 2017 conferences, the word “privacy” wasn’t nearly mentioned, but in 2018 we see a small bump.

In this year, a scandal was exposed that during the 2016 elections President Trump hired a political data firm to collect data from 50 million users through Facebook. The firm bought data from a personality quiz app on Facebook that was developed by psychometric researchers at the University of Cambridge. In the background, the app collected a massive amount of personal info about what do you like, who are your favorite friends..etc which allowed the firm to pick up mental or emotional vulnerabilities and to direct their behavior towards the election in a certain way.

This was called the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Your Business Model is Based on Infiltrating People's privacy

Mark, I believed you when you talked about fighting fake news, adding great features to Instagram and Facebook but I lost my trust when all of a sudden out of nowhere you made privacy your number one priority!

Facebook’s business model by design is based upon using people’s private content to generate relevant Ads

This shift of direction raises questions about your authenticity, including how will you make money from encrypted communications as Facebook generates 99.9% of its $56 billion in annual revenue from targeted advertising (source FB Quarterly press release)

This move of abruptly shuffling priorities reminded me exactly of the campaign that Gilette did in January 2019.

Gilette for years portrayed women as a commodity in their campaigns.

All at once they made a campaign stating the complete opposite of what they stood for.

Of course, no one believed Gilette. The campaign was disastrous, it was FAKE.

A Comeback with Perfect Timing

Three days after Gilette posted their campaign, Egard Watches (an underground brand) published a response video that captured people's attention and got 4M views (that's a lot for a video about watches)

The response was perfect! Just compare the two responses

People Can Smell Unauthenticity From a Mile Away

Last month I was reading an intriguing book by Vanessa Edwards who runs the Science of People, a human behavior research lab in Portland.

I have to share this book with you, it’s called Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People, the book analyzes hundreds of surveys that she tested with people across different demographics in her research lab.

In one of her surveys, she asked her subjects this question “Which of these people habits annoy you the most?”

1. People who are too talkative
2. People who are too quiet
3. People who are fake
4. People who show off

Can you guess the answer? — take a minute and think about it.

It’s ok to have a business model that exploits people’s personal information, nearly all free services follow the same pattern (Gmail, Youtube..etc) and I’m completely fine with that, just don’t be Fake.

Be true to yourself and don’t act like a freedom fighter for privacy because you are not.

Mark, take these actions If you sincerely cared about privacy:

1. Stop the Facebook pixel which tracks users and gathers information about them even after they leave Facebook.
2. Stop gathering data from third-party brokers about your users. For example, if I went to a shop and bought an item, the shop sells this data to Facebook so the system can recommend more items from the same shop.
3. Stop listening and recording voice from users phones.
4. Stop gathering call history data from people’s phones

The future is not private, and the future is not Facebook.

If I know one thing about the future, I know that it's going to be VERY VERY Weird. Just read  Hacking Darwin by Jamie Metzl

Enjoy the post? Let me know what do you think in the comments below.

References

1. Joint investigation of Facebook, Inc. by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
2. Facebook Unveils Redesign as It Tries to Move Past Privacy Scandals — New York Times
3. Mark Zuckerberg says ‘the future is private.’ But his definition of privacy might not be what you think — Business Insider
4. Mark Zuckerberg Announces Facebook’s Pivot to Privacy — The New Yorker
5. A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking — Mark Zuckerberg
6. If the Future is Private, the Future Can’t Be Facebook — Colin Horgan
7. It's Time to Breakup Facebook - Chris Huges
8. Facebook Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2018 Results
9. Zucked - Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe - Roger McName
10. The Transcript sources are all from Singju Post except for 2019 where I downloaded the transcript from Youtube.