Mark Zuckerberg says ‘a private social platform’ is the future at F8

Mark Zuckerberg knows he screwed up. 

The Facebook CEO took the stage at this year’s F8 developer conference in San Jose, Calif. and wasted no time diving headfirst into the issue he told the crowd is the future: privacy. The question as to whether any of us should believe him, however, remained unanswered.

“Today we’re going to talk about building a privacy-focused social platform,” he told the cheering crowd of Facebook employees seated up front. “Privacy gives us the freedom to be ourselves,” Zuckerberg continued, and “that’s why I believe that the future is private.”

Zuckerberg laid out what he considered to be the “6 principles” driving Facebook going forward: private interactions, encryption, reducing permanence, safety, interoperability, and secure data storage. 

“I’m sure we’re going to keep unearthing old issues for a while.”

On the last point, he assured those in the audience that “we’re not going to store sensitive data in countries were it might be improperly accessed.”

Notably, Zuckerberg was pretty vague on the timeline for these privacy-focused changes. 

“It’s going to take time,” he said. “I’m sure we’re going to keep unearthing old issues for a while.”

You can be forgiven for remaining skeptical. It was just last year that Facebook announced, also at F8, that it would releases a “Clear History” privacy tool. “It will take a few months to build Clear History,” the company said in an accompany May 1, 2018, blog post. 

Clear History has yet to be released, and early this month Engadget reported that the tool won’t be released until the fall of this year. 

“We need to change a lot of the ways we run this company,” Zuckerberg said of the requirements needed to make his privacy promises at Facebook a reality. 

Which, hey, some serious changes sounds like a great place to start.