Facebook announces major changes to its platforms following criticism of data privacy practices

Anca Alexe 02/05/2019 | 08:39

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed a series of changes to the company’s social apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, as a direct response to widespread criticism of the firm’s user data protection practices, the BBC reports.

Zuckerberg said that “the future is private” and that Facebook would have a “major shift” in strategy by putting privacy first. He said that the company had to do a lot in order to rebuild trust, acknowledging the recent reputational hits due to privacy-related scandals.

The most significant changes coming to Facebook’s apps include:

Messenger conversations will be end-to-end encrypted, meaning Facebook will not see the messages, and the platform will be fully integrated with WhatsApp
Instagram to trial a “private like count” feature, which would hide the number of likes a post has from viewers and only show it to the account owner
More “ephemeral” ways to share content in messages – without a permanent record
WhatsApp secure payment services that has been trialled in India will be rolled out to other countries later this year
Facebook app will be redesigned to make groups more important in the newsfeed, and will lose the distinctive blue branding, starting in the US and with a planned rollout in other countries soon after
Users will be able to share posts that only include text, stickers or drawings on Instagram, through a new camera mode

Mark Zuckerberg also said Facebook was looking at ways to encode privacy across its entire infrastructure, but added that it was not going to happen overnight.