Facebook Unveils Redesign as It Tries to Move Past Privacy Scandals

The focus on Facebook Groups is convenient for the company because it reduces the amount of public content that it has to moderate and ultimately answer for, said Jennifer Grygiel, an assistant professor of media and communication at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. “I think it’s a way for them to offload responsibility,” the professor said.

Facebook’s developer conference, called F8, began in 2007 to entice developers to build apps for the social network. The company offered developers access to its so-called social graph, its rich web of user connections and personal data.

Last year, The New York Times and others revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a British political firm with developer access to Facebook’s social graph, had harvested the personal information of millions of Facebook users without their consent, in order to build voter profiles for the Trump presidential campaign. That revelation brought heightened scrutiny to the social giant, particularly on how it handled users’ information.

Facebook has since vowed to supervise its users’ information more closely and placed greater restrictions on developer access. That makes this year’s F8 more challenging for developers who have relied on the social network’s data.

“It’s going to make developing for the platform harder for a lot of these folks,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. He added that any short-term difficulties for developers were worth the long-term benefit of greater user trust in the platform.

The new privacy direction may create other issues. Closed groups and encrypted services will make it more difficult to identify and root out dangerous or abusive behavior, Mr. Zuckerberg said, though he added that the company’s automated systems had ways of detecting illicit activities — like examining traffic patterns — without scanning the content of private messages.

“There’s still a lot more to do,” he said, adding that the spotlight on the company had “definitely prompted more introspection around what direction our services should go in.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/technology/facebook-private-communication-groups.html?partner=rss&emc=rss