Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg cut a sheepish
figure when, at the social media giant’s F8
conference in April, he joked: “I know that we
don’t exactly have the strongest reputation
on privacy right now, to put it lightly,” without
TechCrunch hearing a single laugh. However,
even his opening declaration at the conference,
that “the future is private”, felt ultimately hollow
when it transpired that few of Facebook’s
proposed remedies would tackle the root
causes of the problem.
Facebook did announce that it would fully
encrypt all of the messaging apps it owns,
including Messenger, WhatsApp and – yes
- Instagram. However, the site will still be
merging these apps on a backend that will
give the company even greater insight into its
users and so allow it to target them with ads
more effectively. It doesn’t help that Facebook’s
data boat has continued to periodically leak,
with user data shared without consent and
developers allowed to misuse data.
A CASE OF SHARING TOO MUCH
OR TOO LITTLE
Therefore, while sites like Facebook, Instagram
and Twitter do provide a raft of privacy-focused
features that in theory should assuage fears of
data lapses, it can often seem a very different
story in practice. Even the recently-announced
redesign of Facebook’s website and mobile
apps, which brings much of the whiteness
and sparseness of the Instagram interface, has
come under attack.
Fast Company has pointed out that Instagram
“has its own problems with misinformation