HIGHLIGHTS
- Mark Zuckerberg held a discussion with Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain.
- The discussion with Jonathan Zittrain was a part of Mark Zuckerberg’s new year resolution.
- During the discussion, Mark Zuckerberg talked about data privacy and privacy policies.
Past one year has been a tough one for Facebook. The company has been a subject of numerous privacy scandal starting from the Cambridge Analytica controversy last year to the controversy regarding the privacy of its closed health groups earlier this week. Despite being in the centre of privacy storm, social media giant's CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg believes that Facebook has been one of the leading innovators in privacy.
Zuckerberg, in a discussion with the Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain, said that the social media giant's position as an innovator in the area of privacy wasn't a mainstream view. "Thinking about Facebook as an innovator in privacy is certainly not the mainstream view," the Facebook said in the discussion, as reported by CNBC.
"But going back to the very first thing that we did, making it so Harvard students could communicate in a way that they had some confidence that their content and information would be shared with only people within that community, there was no way that people had to communicate stuff at that scale but not have it either be just completely public or just as small as it had been before," he added.
The discussion with Zittrain was the first in the series of discussions that Zuckerberg promised to have in the course of the year as a part of his new year's resolution.
Apart from talking about data privacy, Zuckerberg also talked about the popularity of private chats. During his discussion with the Harvard Law professor, he said that private chats using features like Stories - that disappear after 24 hours-was gaining popularity and that people around the globe were increasingly using these features to send messages to their friends and family.
Notably, Zuckerberg's comments about privacy on Facebook's platform didn't end right there. During the course of his discussion, which is shared on his Facebook profile, the Facebook founder stressed on the fact that discussions around privacy were also centered around policy. "When we talk about privacy, I think a lot of the questions are often about privacy policies and legal or policy type things," Zuckerberg told Zittrain.
"But I actually think there is another element of this that's really fundamental, which is that people want tools that give them new contexts to communicate and that's also fundamentally about giving people power through privacy, not just not violating privacy," he added.
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