Facebook wants to become more private, but not in the ways that matter most

Image: justin sullivan / Getty Images

“The future is private,” Mark Zuckerberg declared, as he awkward-laughed his way through his annual keynote at Facebook’s F8 conference. For Zuckerberg, the event was his chance to sell the world on his vision to turn Facebook into a a “privacy-focused” social network.

To make that happen he plans to rebuild many of the company’s core services, including:

• A redesigned Facebook that emphasizes groups and Stories more than News Feed

• A redesigned Messenger app that also allows you to chat with friends on WhatsApp and Instagram (details on how are still sketchy). It will also have a new social tab for interacting with small groups of friends.

• A redesigned Instagram camera that makes it easier to use Stories like you might have once used News Feed

All of this redesigning also comes with an increased emphasis on end-to-end encryption and ephemerality. Your conversations will be kept private, and the content you create probably won’t stick around as long (again, exact details are unclear). 

To hear Zuckerberg describe it, these changes amount to a monumental shift for the company, whose mission was once “make the world more open and connected.” 

“As we build more of our services around this privacy vision, we’re also changing how we run our company,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page following his keynote address. 

But while Facebook may be rebuilding its apps, it has shown no sign that it’s making any change to its most troubling policies. Namely, the massive amount of data Facebook collects to power its multibillion dollar advertising machine. Because while Facebook may be adapting to a world in which its users would rather share privately anyway, it still has boatloads of data on you and billions of others  (even if you don’t use Facebook). And you can bet that it will continue to use that data to sell ads, even if those ads now appear in somewhere else other than News Feed.

In fact, Zuckerberg and other executives have been adamant that they stand firmly behind their business model and that they don’t have much patience for those who criticize it. 

For more proof, look nor further than Facebook’s promised clear history” tool, that would allow people to limit Facebook ability to track them. A year later, the tool, which BuzzFeed News reported was a last-minute addition by Zuck in an effort to gain some positive press, still hasn’t launched (Facebook said earlier this month the tool would likely launch this fall) and it didn’t even get a passing mention on the F8 stage this year. 

That might be because such a tool, one that could actually enhance users’ privacy, isn’t actually in Facebook’s best interest. 

So, yes, Facebook is changing many core aspects of how we use its service. And some of those changes may even make us feel like our conversations are more private. But when it comes to Facebook’s most valuable asset, your personal data, it’s still very much business as usual.