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Facebook hopes to bounce back with ‘The future is private’ spiel

At F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated the social networking site’s commitment to improving data privacy. The company has become the poster boy for the nightmarish data breaches and how to not protect user data.

At F8, the chief executive told the crowd that the “future is private” and continued to identify areas the company will be working on in terms of user data privacy.

“Over time, I believe that a private social platform will be even more important to our lives than our digital town squares,” Zuckerberg said. “So today, we’re going to start talking about what this could look like as a product, what it means to have your social experience be more intimate, and how we need to change the way we run this company in order to build this.”

To achieve this, Facebook will be resorting to what other platforms and messaging apps have been doing for years: encrypt messages. This is amid the plan to merge other Facebook products that include Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

Messenger has over 1.3 million monthly active users. Facebook will be implementing what WhatsApp has been doing since 2016, which is end-to-end encryption or simply put the networking site will not be able to see or read the exchange of data between users.

“So it’s not like building a system and making it end-to-end encrypted and now we can’t see the messages is really going to hurt ads that much because of the way we were already thinking about that,” Zuckerberg said.

He also said that the redesign, called F5, that will happen on the site over the course of a few weeks will be a more “privacy-focused communications platform.”

Apart from unifying the three main core products of Facebook, the redesign will also focus on the two new products: Facebook Watch and Marketplace putting them in more prominent positions in the Menu bar.

“The mobile redesign is launching today alongside an interactive logo that ditches the blue color scheme,” he said. “The desktop redesign is coming later.”

“Now look, I get that a lot of people aren’t sure we’re serious about this,” Zuckerberg said at F8. “We don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly. But I’m committed to doing this well and starting a new chapter for our product.”

Amid all his talks on privacy, pundits are wondering how the company will do it considering that it gets a majority of its revenue from advertising where data is the new fuel.

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