How Facebook Could Profit From Zuckerberg's So-Called 'Privacy' Push

Saturday the Associated Press analyzed Mark Zuckerberg's new vision for Facebook as an encrypted 'privacy-focused communications platform.'
[C]ritics say the announcement obscures Facebook's deeper motivations: To expand lucrative new commercial services, continue monopolizing the attention of users, develop new data sources to track people and frustrate regulators who might be eyeing a breakup of the social-media behemoth. Facebook 'wants to be the operating system of our lives,' said Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of media studies at the University of Virginia... Vaidhyanathan said Zuckerberg wants people to abandon competing, person-to-person forms of communication such as email, texting and Apple's iMessage in order to 'do everything through a Facebook product.'

The end goal could be transform Facebook into a service like the Chinese app WeChat, which has 1.1 billion users and includes the world's most popular person-to-person online payment system... But Zuckerberg said nothing in the Wednesday blog post about reforming privacy practices in its core business, which remains hungry for data. A recent Wall Street Journal report found that Facebook was still collecting personal information from apps such as user heart rates and when women ovulate... Facebook also has trackers that harvest data on people's online behavior on about 30 percent of the world's websites, said Jeremy Tillman of Ghostery, a popular ad-blocker and anti-tracking software.

'When they say they are building a private messaging platform there is nothing in there that suggests they are going to stop their data collection and ad-targeting business model,' he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.