Facebook’s new privacy mode could be a wonderful thing – just not in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg

When faced with issues of privacy before, the company has proved deeply reluctant to take any responsibility, and have either hidden from, or lashed out at, those seeking to call them to account

Well hallelujah. Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook has turned over a new leaf. It’s going to become more of a “Privacybook”, if you like, offering users encrypted end-to-end communication that no nasty Cambridge Analyticas, snooping on data with a view to mucking around with elections and goodness only knows what else, will be able to access.

Isn’t that nice? But wait, there’s more. The stuff people swap through the “digital living room” (which was how the Zuck described it in the blogpost he put up to explain it all) won’t hang around for days on end as it often does in the “town square” of Facebook and Instagram.

It’ll be there just long enough for you to see it and then zap! It’s gone, blasted off into the digital ether never to be seen again.

This could make the process of compiling a digital profile on you that much harder. The marketeers must be crying into their coffee at the thought that they’ll no longer be able to zero in on your fascination for platform heels, comic books featuring the Doom Patrol, or just the fact that your kids play sports for the Wellingford Wanderers.

The Zuck and his team’ll handle payments and encourage commerce through the new micro-groups of pals he envisages messaging each other about the latest D&G platforms, the Patrol’s most recent dust up with their arch enemy, and the dodgy refereeing decisions during the Wanderers’ weekend loss to Riverton Rovers.

But there’s more. Just think about the dissidents! We’ve thought about them, says the Zuck. I’ve talked to them, and as a result we won’t be storing data in countries with dodgy human rights records. The private chatter we want to encourage will keep them safe. The thuggish regimes they oppose will find it harder to harass them if they communicate via Privacybook’s new service(s). There’ll be no footprints for the secret police to zero in on, no digital samizdat to be intercepted.

Can you see the problem with all this? It isn’t terribly hard.

Privacybook might be bad news for rotten regimes but it could be catnip to nasty non-state actors. Hey terrorists: communicate privately with end-to-end encryption so no one can tell what you’re up to. Hey crooks: plans your heists digitally. Hey sex offenders: groom away!

The Zuck says Facebook will do “everything we can” to keep people safe but with the caveat of “within the limits of what’s possible in an encrypted service”. That looks suspiciously like a get-out-of-jail-free card for when the privacy platform finds itself at the centre of something nasty.

The great man concedes that Facebook has “a reasonability to work with law enforcement” and is actively engaged in improving its ability to “identify and stop bad actors across our apps by detecting patterns of activity or through other means, even when we can’t see the content of messages”.

Oo-er.

Whatever that means it presumably wouldn’t apply to the people who spread everyday old fashioned hate. The exposure of the vile anti-Muslim bigotry indulged in by some Tories by the Twitter account @MatesJacob won’t be so easy when Privacybook goes live. And goodness me it needed exposing.

What really worries me as a parent is this: think, for a moment, about those poor kids who get targeted by small groups of cyberbullies and kill themselves. It’s the sort of thing that already crops up far too regularly. Just imagine how easy it would be for it to happen via the service envisaged by the Zuck. You might never be able to find the identities of the perpetrators. You might not even know it has been happening. Will the Zuck’s “other means” pick up cyberbullying? Doubtful.

Start thinking too hard in this direction and it gets chilling.

The Zuck acknowledges that the service will involve certain “trade offs”.

The problem with him and Facebook is that they’ve a terrible record when it comes to managing the issues their existing “open” products throw up.

Zuckerberg and his company have shown an almost complete inability to recognise or respond to the dangers inherent in them. They have proved deeply reluctant to take any responsibility when things go wrong, and have either hidden from, or lashed out at, those seeking to call them to account.

Privacybook could be a wonderful thing, but only in the hands of an organisation alive to the potential dangers. Based on the history of its open platforms, Facebook is far from that.