Zuckerberg Inspired By WhatsApp Rediscovers ‘Privacy’ as the Future of Facebook

On January, it was reported that Facebook was planning an integration of its various independent messaging apps. This was a big move since some were acquisitions (Instagram and WhatsApp) while some were homegrown (Messenger) and they all work in their own unique way.

It seemed like Facebook wanted to make their ecosystem more useful to its billions of users. Well, now Mark Zuckerberg is confirming all of that and outlining his vision for social network.

In a lengthy Facebook note, Mark Zuckerberg outlined what he called a Privacy Focused Vision For Social Networking. This has his thoughts towards what he thinks is the future for social networking and he seems to be inspired by WhatsApp.

The reason about his vision is how people prefer to connect privately rather than connect in a large forum. “As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platform,” he said. He sees an opportunity to build a simpler platform that is focused on privacy first.

He mentions WhatsApp as the muse to this change. “We plan to build this the way we’ve developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case.”He also plans to add utility to that base where they add calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments and commerce.

His vision for this privacy platform involves private interactions between people, end to end encryption, safety, interoperability between their apps, secure data storage of user data and reducing permanence of user info.

Zuckerberg says that there are a lot of niggles that need to be ironed out to realize this reality and it might change how we use Facebook apps. The fact that he wants a situation where we talk freely between the Facebook apps while our data is ‘secure’ and can remove it when we want to seems lofty but it is the future according to Mark Zuckerberg