Mark Zuckerberg to explain how Facebook gets 'privacy focused'

San Francisco, Apr 30: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will kick off the company's annual F8 developer conference Tuesday with what are expected to be more details about his new "privacy-focused" vision for the social network — part of his strategy for batting away Facebook's growing array of critics, emboldened regulators and competitors.

Zuckerberg and his lieutenant, Sheryl Sandberg, have apologised repeatedly over the past year for Facebook's ever-expanding list of mishaps over privacy, data misuse and security problems. Last week, the company said it is setting aside USD 3 billion to cover a possible fine from the Federal Trade Commission over privacy violations. Facebook has suffered hacks, allowed hate speech and live-streamed mass-shooting horror.

Amid all that, Zuckerberg is likely to focus on Facebook's future by emphasising private messaging, Facebook's role in "communities," and harnessing artificial intelligence to improve discourse. Conference attendees — by and large software developers who make a livelihood working with Facebook and its family of apps — will have a variety of sessions to choose from. They can, for instance, sit in on "Facebook Stories School," where they'll learn about "tips and tricks" for making the best of this disappearing video feature.

Or they can take in "Applying AI to Keep the Platform Safe," where they can discover how Facebook uses artificial intelligence to "detect and remove bad content." Zuckerberg said last week that Facebook's focus on private communications will be built out over the next five years or more. The model for this, he said, will be WhatsApp, a Facebook service that already offers end-to-end encrypted messaging — messages that can be opened by only the sender and the recipient and not by Facebook itself. But that approach comes with its own sets of problems.

In India, for instance, misinformation spread on WhatsApp has led to real-life violence and even killings. "A few years ago, we probably would've rolled this out and tried to deal with issues as they came up," Zuckerberg said during Facebook's earnings call on April 24.

"But now part of our new approach of trying to be more proactive about social issues is trying to build in from the ground up, getting this right up front." Last year's F8 conference took place weeks after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which tens of millions of Facebook users had their personal data accessed by a political data-mining firm without their consent.

Zuckerberg had also just testified before Congress about that and other privacy mishaps, but at F8 was already trying to put those troubles behind him.

PTI