Zuckerberg’s New Privacy Essay Shows Why Facebook Needs to Be Broken Up
Facebook is an anti-competitive monopoly - through buyout of competitors Zuckerberg’s empire has aggregated most of our modern social media into a crazy quilt where the customer needs and wants are ignored, and where the worst amongst us oftimes have the loudest voice. Is it time to break them up?
By narrowly construing privacy to be almost exclusively about end-to-end encryption that would prevent a would-be eavesdropper from intercepting communications, he manages to avoid having to think about Facebook’s weaknesses and missteps. Privacy is not just about keeping secrets. It’s also about how flows of information shape us as individuals and as a society. What we say to whom and why is a function of context. Social networks change that context, and in so doing they change the nature of privacy, in ways that are both good and bad.
Russian propagandists used Facebook to sway the 2016 American election, perhaps decisively. Myanmarese military leaders used Facebook to incite an anti-Rohingya genocide. These are consequences of the ways in which Facebook has diminished privacy. They are not the result of failures of encryption.
More: Zuckerberg’s new privacy essay shows why Facebook needs to be broken up - MIT Technology Review