Zuckerberg announces a comprehensive plan for a new, privacy-focused Facebook, but fails to mention data sharing and ad targeting

Mark Zuckerberg's 3,000 word blog post about his plan to create a parallel set of Facebook services that contain long-overdue privacy protections has plenty to please both the regulators who are increasingly ready to fine the company billions and possibly even break it up, but also privacy advocates who will rightly cheer the announcement that the service will be increasing its end-to-end encryption offerings, only storing data in countries with good track records on human rights and the rule of law, and allowing users to mark some of their conversations as ephemeral, designed to be permanently deleted after a short while.

But Zuckerberg's promises contain one important omission, as Wired's Issie Lapowsky and Nicholas Thompson point out: Zuck does not mention his company's future plans for data sharing and ad-targeting, two of the company's most controversial and potentially compromising activities.

It's likely that Facebook plans to earn money from its end-to-end encrypted services by analyzing the metadata -- who sends things to whom, where, and in what context -- while ignoring the payloads of the messages, which it will no longer be able to access. This will severely limit the service's userfulness to law enforcement, spies, and other parties who might nonconsensually seek access to your conversations, but it still affords an enormous wealth of metadata that Facebook will likely mine to target ads to you.

After all, the NSA's primary bulk-data collection focuses on metadata, not "data" (though in truth there is no firm line delineating the two) -- computers are really good at analyzing the kinds of metadata that other computers generate, after all, and struggle with the messy, unstructured data that messy, unstructured human beings generate. Read the rest