Zuckerberg quiere que los mensajes caduquen automáticamente para hacer de Facebook una "sala de estar"

Mar 6, 2019

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by

Neto

in Apps

Una visión centrada en la privacidad para las redes sociales

Mi enfoque durante los últimos años ha sido comprender y abordar los mayores desafíos que enfrenta Facebook. Esto significa tomar posiciones sobre temas importantes relacionados con el futuro de Internet. En esta nota, expondré nuestra visión y principios en torno a la construcción de una plataforma de redes sociales y mensajes centrados en la privacidad. Hay mucho que hacer aquí y estamos comprometidos a trabajar abiertamente y consultar con expertos de la sociedad a medida que desarrollamos esto.

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En los últimos 15 años, Facebook e Instagram han ayudado a las personas a conectarse con amigos, comunidades e intereses en el equivalente digital de una plaza de la ciudad. Pero cada vez más, las personas también quieren conectarse de forma privada en el equivalente digital de la sala de estar. Al pensar en el futuro de Internet, creo que una plataforma de comunicaciones centrada en la privacidad será aún más importante que las plataformas abiertas de hoy. La privacidad le da a la gente la libertad de ser ellos mismos y conectarse más naturalmente, por eso construimos redes sociales.

Hoy ya vemos que los mensajes privados, las historias efímeras y los grupos pequeños son, con mucho, las áreas de más rápido crecimiento de la comunicación en línea. Hay un número de razones para esto. Muchas personas prefieren la intimidad de comunicarse uno a uno o solo con unos pocos amigos. Las personas son más cautelosas de tener un registro permanente de lo que han compartido. Y todos esperamos poder hacer cosas como pagos de forma privada y segura.

Las redes sociales públicas continuarán siendo muy importantes en la vida de las personas, para conectarse con todos sus conocidos, descubrir nuevas personas, ideas y contenidos, y darles una voz más amplia. Las personas encuentran esto valioso todos los días, y todavía hay muchos servicios útiles para construir sobre ellos. Pero ahora, con todas las formas en que las personas también quieren interactuar en privado, también existe la oportunidad de crear una plataforma más simple que se centre primero en la privacidad.

Entiendo que mucha gente no cree que Facebook pueda o quiera construir este tipo de plataforma centrada en la privacidad, porque, francamente, actualmente no tenemos una reputación sólida para crear servicios de protección de la privacidad, y nos hemos centrado históricamente en las herramientas para compartir más abiertamente. Pero repetidamente hemos demostrado que podemos evolucionar para construir los servicios que la gente realmente quiere, incluso en mensajes privados e historias.

Creo que el futuro de la comunicación cambiará cada vez más a servicios privados y encriptados donde las personas pueden confiar en que lo que se dicen entre sí se mantiene seguro y sus mensajes y contenido no se quedarán para siempre. Este es el futuro, espero que ayudemos a lograrlo.

Planeamos construir esto de la manera que lo hemos desarrollado en WhatsApp: enfocarnos en el caso de uso más fundamental y privado, la mensajería, hacerlo lo más seguro posible y luego construir más formas para que las personas interactúen además de eso, incluidas llamadas, videos. chats, grupos, historias, negocios, pagos, comercio y, en última instancia, una plataforma para muchos otros tipos de servicios privados.

Esta plataforma enfocada en la privacidad se construirá alrededor de varios principios:

Interacciones privadas. Las personas deben tener lugares sencillos e íntimos en los que tengan un control claro sobre quién puede comunicarse con ellos y la confianza de que nadie más puede acceder a lo que comparten.

Cifrado Las comunicaciones privadas de las personas deben ser seguras. El cifrado de extremo a extremo impide que cualquier persona, incluidos nosotros, vea lo que las personas comparten en nuestros servicios.

Permanencia. Las personas deben sentirse cómodas al ser ellas mismas, y no deben tener que preocuparse por lo que comparten y luego volver a lastimarlas. Por lo tanto, no mantendremos mensajes o historias durante más tiempo del necesario para brindar el servicio o más tiempo del que la gente quiera.

La seguridad. Las personas deben esperar que hagamos todo lo posible para mantenerlos seguros en nuestros servicios dentro de los límites de lo que es posible en un servicio cifrado.

Interoperabilidad. Las personas deben poder usar cualquiera de nuestras aplicaciones para llegar a sus amigos, y deben poder comunicarse a través de redes de manera fácil y segura.

Almacenamiento seguro de datos. Las personas deben esperar que no almacenemos datos confidenciales en países con registros débiles de derechos humanos como la privacidad y la libertad de expresión para evitar que se acceda de manera incorrecta a los datos.

En los próximos años, planeamos reconstruir más de nuestros servicios en torno a estas ideas. Las decisiones a las que nos enfrentaremos en el camino significarán tomar posiciones sobre temas importantes relacionados con el futuro de Internet. Entendemos que hay muchas concesiones para lograrlo, y estamos comprometidos a consultar con expertos y discutir la mejor manera de avanzar. Esto llevará algún tiempo, pero no vamos a desarrollar este gran cambio en nuestra dirección detrás de puertas cerradas. Vamos a hacer esto de la manera más abierta y colaborativa posible, ya que muchos de estos problemas afectan a diferentes partes de la sociedad.

Interacciones privadas como fundación

Para que un servicio se sienta privado, nunca debe haber ninguna duda sobre con quién se está comunicando. Hemos trabajado arduamente para crear privacidad en todos nuestros productos, incluidos los de uso público. Pero una gran propiedad de los servicios de mensajería es que incluso a medida que su lista de contactos crece, sus hilos y grupos individuales permanecen privados. A medida que tus amigos evolucionan con el tiempo, los servicios de mensajería evolucionan con gracia y se mantienen íntimos.

Esto es diferente de las redes sociales más amplias, donde las personas pueden acumular amigos o seguidores hasta que los servicios se sientan más públicos. Esto se adapta bien a muchos usos importantes: decirle a todos tus amigos sobre algo, usar tu voz en temas importantes, encontrar comunidades de personas con intereses similares, seguir a creadores y medios de comunicación, comprar y vender cosas, organizar recaudaciones de fondos, empresas en crecimiento, o muchos otras cosas que se benefician de tener a todos tus conocidos en un solo lugar. Aún así, cuando ven todas estas experiencias juntos, se siente más como una plaza de un pueblo que como un espacio más íntimo como una sala de estar.

Existe la oportunidad de construir una plataforma que se centra en todas las formas en que las personas desean interactuar en privado. Esta sensación de privacidad e intimidad no se trata solo de características técnicas, sino que está diseñada profundamente en la sensación del servicio en general. En WhatsApp, por ejemplo, nuestro equipo está obsesionado con crear un ambiente íntimo en todos los aspectos del producto. Incluso donde hemos construido características que permiten un intercambio más amplio, sigue siendo una experiencia menos pública. Cuando el equipo formó grupos, establecieron un límite de tamaño para asegurarse de que cada interacción fuera privada. Cuando enviamos historias en WhatsApp, limitamos el contenido público porque nos preocupaba que pudiera erosionar la sensación de privacidad al ver gran cantidad de contenido público, incluso si no cambiaba realmente con quién estás compartiendo.

En unos pocos años, espero que las futuras versiones de Messenger y WhatsApp se conviertan en las principales formas en que las personas se comunican en la red de Facebook. Nos centramos en hacer que ambas aplicaciones sean más rápidas, más sencillas, más privadas y más seguras, incluso con cifrado de extremo a extremo. Luego planeamos agregar más formas de interactuar en privado con sus amigos, grupos y negocios. Si esta evolución es exitosa, interactuar con sus amigos y familiares a través de la red de Facebook se convertirá en una experiencia fundamentalmente más privada.

Cifrado y seguridad

Las personas esperan que sus comunicaciones privadas sean seguras y que solo las vean las personas a las que las enviaron, no los piratas informáticos, los delincuentes, los gobiernos que se extienden más allá, o incluso las personas que operan los servicios que están utilizando.

Existe una creciente conciencia de que mientras más entidades tengan acceso a sus datos, más vulnerabilidades habrá para que alguien las use mal o para que un ataque cibernético las exponga. También existe una creciente preocupación entre algunos de que la tecnología puede estar centralizando el poder en manos de gobiernos y empresas como la nuestra. Y a algunas personas les preocupa que nuestros servicios puedan acceder a sus mensajes y usarlos para publicidad u otras formas que no esperan.

El cifrado de extremo a extremo es una herramienta importante para desarrollar una red social centrada en la privacidad. El cifrado es descentralizador: limita servicios como el nuestro a ver el contenido que fluye a través de ellos y hace que sea mucho más difícil para cualquier otra persona acceder a su información. Esta es la razón por la que el cifrado es una parte cada vez más importante de nuestras vidas en línea, desde la banca hasta los servicios de salud. También es la razón por la que creamos el cifrado de extremo a extremo en WhatsApp después de que lo adquirimos.

In the last year, I’ve spoken with dissidents who’ve told me encryption is the reason they are free, or even alive. Governments often make unlawful demands for data, and while we push back and fight these requests in court, there’s always a risk we’ll lose a case — and if the information isn’t encrypted we’d either have to turn over the data or risk our employees being arrested if we failed to comply. This may seem extreme, but we’ve had a case where one of our employees was actually jailed for not providing access to someone’s private information even though we couldn’t access it since it was encrypted.

At the same time, there are real safety concerns to address before we can implement end-to-end encryption across all of our messaging services. Encryption is a powerful tool for privacy, but that includes the privacy of people doing bad things. When billions of people use a service to connect, some of them are going to misuse it for truly terrible things like child exploitation, terrorism, and extortion. We have a responsibility to work with law enforcement and to help prevent these wherever we can. We are working to improve our ability to identify and stop bad actors across our apps by detecting patterns of activity or through other means, even when we can’t see the content of the messages, and we will continue to invest in this work. But we face an inherent tradeoff because we will never find all of the potential harm we do today when our security systems can see the messages themselves.

Finding the right ways to protect both privacy and safety is something societies have historically grappled with. There are still many open questions here and we’ll consult with safety experts, law enforcement and governments on the best ways to implement safety measures. We’ll also need to work together with other platforms to make sure that as an industry we get this right. The more we can create a common approach, the better.

On balance, I believe working towards implementing end-to-end encryption for all private communications is the right thing to do. Messages and calls are some of the most sensitive private conversations people have, and in a world of increasing cyber security threats and heavy-handed government intervention in many countries, people want us to take the extra step to secure their most private data. That seems right to me, as long as we take the time to build the appropriate safety systems that stop bad actors as much as we possibly can within the limits of an encrypted service. We’ve started working on these safety systems building on the work we’ve done in WhatsApp, and we’ll discuss them with experts through 2019 and beyond before fully implementing end-to-end encryption. As we learn more from those experts, we’ll finalize how to roll out these systems.

Reducing Permanence

We increasingly believe it’s important to keep information around for shorter periods of time. People want to know that what they share won’t come back to hurt them later, and reducing the length of time their information is stored and accessible will help.

One challenge in building social tools is the “permanence problem”. As we build up large collections of messages and photos over time, they can become a liability as well as an asset. For example, many people who have been on Facebook for a long time have photos from when they were younger that could be embarrassing. But people also really love keeping a record of their lives. And if all posts on Facebook and Instagram disappeared, people would lose access to a lot of valuable knowledge and experiences others have shared.

I believe there’s an opportunity to set a new standard for private communication platforms — where content automatically expires or is archived over time. Stories already expire after 24 hours unless you archive them, and that gives people the comfort to share more naturally. This philosophy could be extended to all private content.

For example, messages could be deleted after a month or a year by default. This would reduce the risk of your messages resurfacing and embarrassing you later. Of course you’d have the ability to change the timeframe or turn off auto-deletion for your threads if you wanted. And we could also provide an option for you to set individual messages to expire after a few seconds or minutes if you wanted.

It also makes sense to limit the amount of time we store messaging metadata. We use this data to run our spam and safety systems, but we don’t always need to keep it around for a long time. An important part of the solution is to collect less personal data in the first place, which is the way WhatsApp was built from the outset.

Interoperability

People want to be able to choose which service they use to communicate with people. However, today if you want to message people on Facebook you have to use Messenger, on Instagram you have to use Direct, and on WhatsApp you have to use WhatsApp. We want to give people a choice so they can reach their friends across these networks from whichever app they prefer.

We plan to start by making it possible for you to send messages to your contacts using any of our services, and then to extend that interoperability to SMS too. Of course, this would be opt-in and you will be able to keep your accounts separate if you’d like.

There are privacy and security advantages to interoperability. For example, many people use Messenger on Android to send and receive SMS texts. Those texts can’t be end-to-end encrypted because the SMS protocol is not encrypted. With the ability to message across our services, however, you’d be able to send an encrypted message to someone’s phone number in WhatsApp from Messenger.

This could also improve convenience in many experiences where people use Facebook or Instagram as their social network and WhatsApp as their preferred messaging service. For example, lots of people selling items on Marketplace list their phone number so people can message them about buying it. That’s not ideal, because you’re giving strangers your phone number. With interoperability, you’d be able to use WhatsApp to receive messages sent to your Facebook account without sharing your phone number — and the buyer wouldn’t have to worry about whether you prefer to be messaged on one network or the other.

You can imagine many simple experiences — a person discovers a business on Instagram and easily transitions to their preferred messaging app for secure payments and customer support; another person wants to catch up with a friend and can send them a message that goes to their preferred app without having to think about where that person prefers to be reached; or you simply post a story from your day across both Facebook and Instagram and can get all the replies from your friends in one place.

You can already send and receive SMS texts through Messenger on Android today, and we’d like to extend this further in the future, perhaps including the new telecom RCS standard. However, there are several issues we’ll need to work through before this will be possible. First, Apple doesn’t allow apps to interoperate with SMS on their devices, so we’d only be able to do this on Android. Second, we’d need to make sure interoperability doesn’t compromise the expectation of encryption that people already have using WhatsApp. Finally, it would create safety and spam vulnerabilities in an encrypted system to let people send messages from unknown apps where our safety and security systems couldn’t see the patterns of activity.

These are significant challenges and there are many questions here that require further consultation and discussion. But if we can implement this, we can give people more choice to use their preferred service to securely reach the people they want.

Secure Data Storage

People want to know their data is stored securely in places they trust. Looking at the future of the internet and privacy, I believe one of the most important decisions we’ll make is where we’ll build data centers and store people’s sensitive data.

There’s an important difference between providing a service in a country and storing people’s data there. As we build our infrastructure around the world, we’ve chosen not to build data centers in countries that have a track record of violating human rights like privacy or freedom of expression. If we build data centers and store sensitive data in these countries, rather than just caching non-sensitive data, it could make it easier for those governments to take people’s information.

Upholding this principle may mean that our services will get blocked in some countries, or that we won’t be able to enter others anytime soon. That’s a tradeoff we’re willing to make. We do not believe storing people’s data in some countries is a secure enough foundation to build such important internet infrastructure on.

Of course, the best way to protect the most sensitive data is not to store it at all, which is why WhatsApp doesn’t store any encryption keys and we plan to do the same with our other services going forward.

But storing data in more countries also establishes a precedent that emboldens other governments to seek greater access to their citizen’s data and therefore weakens privacy and security protections for people around the world. I think it’s important for the future of the internet and privacy that our industry continues to hold firm against storing people’s data in places where it won’t be secure.

Next Steps

Over the next year and beyond, there are a lot more details and tradeoffs to work through related to each of these principles. A lot of this work is in the early stages, and we are committed to consulting with experts, advocates, industry partners, and governments — including law enforcement and regulators — around the world to get these decisions right.

At the same time, working through these principles is only the first step in building out a privacy-focused social platform. Beyond that, significant thought needs to go into all of the services we build on top of that foundation — from how people do payments and financial transactions, to the role of businesses and advertising, to how we can offer a platform for other private services.

But these initial questions are critical to get right. If we do this well, we can create platforms for private sharing that could be even more important to people than the platforms we’ve already built to help people share and connect more openly.

Doing this means taking positions on some of the most important issues facing the future of the internet. As a society, we have an opportunity to set out where we stand, to decide how we value private communications, and who gets to decide how long and where data should be stored.

I believe we should be working towards a world where people can speak privately and live freely knowing that their information will only be seen by who they want to see it and won’t all stick around forever. If we can help move the world in this direction, I will be proud of the difference we’ve made.

On feed-based “broader social networks, where people can accumulate friends or followers until the services feel more public . . . it feels more like a town square than a more intimate space like a living room” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained in a blog post today. With messaging, groups, and ephemeral stories as the […] n","protected":false},"author":1603003,"featured_media":1549512,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"outcome":"","status":"","crunchbase_tag":0,"amp_status":"","relegenceEntities":[],"relegenceSubjects":[],"jetpack_publicize_message":"Zuckerberg wants messages to auto-expire to make Facebook a “living room” https://tcrn.ch/2VCWIUA by @joshconstine"},"categories":[17396],"tags":[],"crunchbase_tag":[],"tc_stories_tax":[],"tc_event":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/mark-zuckerberg-trump-russian-interference.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"shortlink":"https://tcrn.ch/2VCWIUA","rapidData":{"pt":"","pct":""},"featured":false,"subtitle":"","fundingRound":false,"seoTitle":"","seoDescription":"","premiumContent":false,"tc_cb_mapping":[],"associatedEvent":null,"event":null,"authors":[1603003],"hideFeaturedImage":false,"relatedArticles":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/1792907"}],"collection":[{"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-json/wp/v2/types/post"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/1792907/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1792929,"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/1792907/revisions/1792929"}],"authors":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-json/tc/v1/users/1603003"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"count":0,"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-json/wp/v2/comments?post=1792907&order=asc&tc_hierarchical=flat"}],"https://techcrunch.com/edit":[{"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=1792907&action=edit"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-json/tc/v1/users/1603003"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/1549512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media?parent=1792907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-json/wp/v2/categories?post=1792907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-json/wp/v2/tags?post=1792907"},{"taxonomy":"_tc_cb_tag_taxonomy","embeddable":true,"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-json/wp/v2/crunchbase_tag?post=1792907"},{"taxonomy":"tc_stories_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-json/wp/v2/tc_stories_tax?post=1792907"},{"taxonomy":"tc_event","embeddable":true,"href":"https://techcrunch.com/wp-json/wp/v2/tc_event?post=1792907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https://api.w.org/{rel}","templated":true}]},"_embedded":{"authors":[{"id":1603003"name":"JoshConstine""url":"""description":"""link":"https://techcrunchcom/author/josh-constine/""slug":"josh-constine""avatar_urls":{"24":"https://securegravatarcom/avatar/fd3b857e7f0024396cdbd36c4c102a5d?s=24&d=identicon&r=g""48":"https://securegravatarcom/avatar/fd3b857e7f0024396cdbd36c4c102a5d?s=48&d=identicon&r=g""96":"https://securegravatarcom/avatar/fd3b857e7f0024396cdbd36c4c102a5d?s=96&d=identicon&r=g"}"links":{"homepage":"http://wwwJoshConstinecom""facebook":"http://wwwfacebookcom/JoshConstine""twitter":"https://twittercom/joshconstine""linkedin":"https://wwwlinkedincom/in/joshconstine/""crunchbase":"https://wwwcrunchbasecom/person/josh-constine"}"position":"Editor-At-Large""cbDescription":"[{"id":1603003"name":"JoshConstine""url":"""description":"""link":"https://techcrunchcom/author/josh-constine/""slug":"josh-constine""avatar_urls":{"24":"https://securegravatarcom/avatar/fd3b857e7f0024396cdbd36c4c102a5d?s=24&d=identicon&r=g""48":"https://securegravatarcom/avatar/fd3b857e7f0024396cdbd36c4c102a5d?s=48&d=identicon&r=g""96":"https://securegravatarcom/avatar/fd3b857e7f0024396cdbd36c4c102a5d?s=96&d=identicon&r=g"}"links":{"homepage":"http://wwwJoshConstinecom""facebook":"http://wwwfacebookcom/JoshConstine""twitter":"https://twittercom/joshconstine""linkedin":"https://wwwlinkedincom/in/joshconstine/""crunchbase":"https://wwwcrunchbasecom/person/josh-constine"}"position":"Editor-At-Large""cbDescription":"

Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently an Editor-At-Large for TechCrunch and is available for speaking engagements.

Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook through its acquisition by WebMediaBrands, covering everything about the social network.

Constine graduated from Stanford University in 2009 with a Master's degree in Cybersociology, examining the influence of technology on social interaction. He researched the impact of privacy controls on the socialization of children, meme popularity cycles, and what influences the click through rate of links posted to Twitter.

Constine also received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors from Stanford University in 2007, with a concentration in Social Psychology & Interpersonal Processes.

Josh Constine is an experienced public speaker, and has moderated over 120 on-stage interviews in 15 countries with leaders including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whistleblower Edward Snowden (via on-stage video conference), and U.S. Senator Cory Booker. He is available to moderate panels and fireside chats, deliver keynotes, and judge hackathon and pitch competitions.

Constine has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, The Atlantic, BBC World Magazine, Slate, and more, plus has been featured on television on Good Morning, America, The Today Show, China Central Television, and Fox News. Constine is ranked as the #1 most cited tech journalist on prestigious news aggregator Techmeme.

Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently an Editor-At-Large for TechCrunch and is available for speaking engagements.

Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook through its acquisition by WebMediaBrands, covering everything about the social network.

Constine graduated from Stanford University in 2009 with a Master's degree in Cybersociology, examining the influence of technology on social interaction. He researched the impact of privacy controls on the socialization of children, meme popularity cycles, and what influences the click through rate of links posted to Twitter.

Constine also received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors from Stanford University in 2007, with a concentration in Social Psychology & Interpersonal Processes.

Josh Constine is an experienced public speaker, and has moderated over 120 on-stage interviews in 15 countries with leaders including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whistleblower Edward Snowden (via on-stage video conference), and U.S. Senator Cory Booker. He is available to moderate panels and fireside chats, deliver keynotes, and judge hackathon and pitch competitions.

Constine has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, The Atlantic, BBC World Magazine, Slate, and more, plus has been featured on television on Good Morning, America, The Today Show, China Central Television, and Fox News. Constine is ranked as the #1 most cited tech journalist on prestigious news aggregator Techmeme.