The past year or so hasn’t been particularly good for Facebook’s reputation where we’ve seen the company drop from being the place for all the cool kids to hang out, to being the social networking platform that users are trying to delete. This is due to the various privacy scandals that have been dogging the company even until today.However Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg is hoping to win back your trust where in a blog post he penned on Facebook’s website, Zuckerberg promised that the company would be taking on a privacy-focused roadmap for the future. Zuckerberg admits that this seems counterintuitive for the company, but he also believes that this is something he thinks that they will be able to do for their users.
“I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform — because frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we’ve historically focused on tools for more open sharing. But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.”
Zuckerberg goes on to highlight some of the steps that the company will be taking to ensure better privacy for their users. This includes “reducing permanence” which means that what you post won’t be kept forever. He also touches on things like data centers where Facebook has chosen in the past to avoid countries known for violating human rights such as privacy or freedom of expression.
We’re not sure if all of this will be enough for Facebook to regain the trust of its users, but we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime Facebook had recently confirmed that they will be launching its “Clear History” tool later this year.