exstral

Take a look at this condensed keynote presentation from Facebooks developer conference. They know they are failing our trust and are trying do better. Sounds almost believable right?

Just watching this video gives me the shivers. The new facebook design will be more “immersive”, as in more addictive! They are also adding a plethora of new features, it almost starts to sound like they expect us to live our entire life on facebook. Everything will be integrated and so practical! THey say don’t worry about privacy because all messages and calls will be end to end encrypted!

This end to end encryption will be impressive, but with the amount of data they have, this encryption will be but a drop in an ocean. They can still see absolutely everything else you do on all their products, including the metadata of who you message and when you message them, across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp!

This cross messaging feature is actually the one that frightens me the most about their future plans. Even the European Union has tried to stop it. Regardless any hindrances, Facebook is set on unifying their messaging services very soon.

Just let this sink in for a moment. When unifying their messaging systems, the end result is that you will be able to message anyone on Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp. The threatening part is that to be able to do this, they will have to unify their contact lists and personal connections with their billions of users.

Since their inception, WhatsApp has forced all users to automatically upload their address books to them, otherwise you wont be able to find your friends and the app is very difficult to use. This feature has also been added to Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. Under the guise of “help us find your friends” your information is sucked up and stored basically FOREVER. This creates an insane trove of information about who knows who in the real world.

And not only does this give away information about who you know, but even if I do not upload my contact list, they will still find my number in all my friends contact lists. And thus they can predict who I am friends with and add me to your “recommended friends”.

Whatever facebooks ideology, they will always be an enormous international company in a capitalist economy which means that they will continue building this capitalist future where we are the product.