Zuckerberg's Privacy Pivot Fails to Hide the Need to Break Up Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg's recent essay on privacy acts as a deceptive power grab rather than a genuine shift in company values. The argument highlights how Facebook's massive size and profit model inherently rely on destroying user privacy.
Mark Zuckerberg publishes a lengthy essay claiming Facebook shifts its focus to privacy, but this supposed change of heart serves as a deceptive power grab rather than a genuine act of contrition. He expresses apparent surprise that people want to connect privately, contradicting his earlier mission to make the world completely open and connected.
Facebook operates as an uncategorizable giant that functions as a newspaper, telephone exchange, and broadcast network all at once, generating over $55 billion in annual advertising revenue with massive profit margins. The company achieves this historic profitability by commodifying user privacy on an unprecedented scale, performing an arbitrage between the data users think they surrender and the information Facebook actually sells to advertisers.
Zuckerberg offers no substantive explanation for how Facebook plans to maintain its lucrative business model in this new supposed era of privacy, rendering his Damascene moment highly suspect. Because a diminishment of privacy remains the core product of this overwhelmingly powerful corporation, protecting user data in any meaningful way requires breaking up Facebook entirely.