Between the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other controversies, the last few years have been quite turbulent for Facebook and even the first days of 2020 have not exactly started on the right foot, given that the controversies related to privacy and fake news have not subsided .
In this chaos, the now iconic figure of Mark Zuckerberg has announced good quarterly results and outlined his company's intentions regarding 2020 and beyond. The focus is obviously focused on privacy and the fight against false news, but the Facebook CEO wanted to give a general picture of the situation also on the other projects that his company is carrying out, from digital payment methods to virtual reality.
Facebook projects for 2020 and beyond
"Our community includes 2.9 billion people and over 140 million small businesses that use our services monthlyThis opens the "letter" that the CEO wanted to send to those who care about the future of Facebook. The world population is 7.7 billion (Worldometer data) and this means that the ecosystem created by Zuckerberg it gathers almost 38% of the people on Earth. Understand, therefore, that we are talking about one of the largest, if not the largest, digital empires of all time.
Facebook services are used all over the world and, in some ways, make it smaller. From a great power, however, derive great responsibilities and in fact Zuckerberg goes straight to the point: "This will be an important and demanding year. There are 2020 elections coming up and we are very focused on this. […] We will also focus on building a private social platform […], on new tools for commerce and payments and on the next augmented and virtual reality platform".
Going into more detail regarding the US presidential election, the Facebook CEO admits that errors were made in 2016. In fact, Zuckerberg says that his company has lagged behind during the last elections, but that he has now learned from the past and has made huge steps forward, after working hard in this field all over the world, from Europe to India, passing for Mexico.
The CEO also declares that the prevention system created by his company is the most advanced among those used by the giants of the Web and that Facebook often contacts the police and intelligence agencies to report threats. US citizens will vote on November 3, 2020 and Zuckerberg thinks that there will still be discussions about what content should be considered "good" in the election campaign, but according to the CEO of Facebook there is no longer any danger of repeating what happened four years ago. In the meantime, the first step has already been taken: deep fakes for political purposes have been banned.
We then move on to the privacy issue: Zuckerberg says that the company is introducing tools that will become the new standard for the sector, going even beyond what is required by current laws. The Facebook CEO declares that there are over 1000 engineers working on privacy-related projects and that the controls recently implemented on Facebook are nothing more than the first objective achieved from this point of view.
"We have also introduced a feature that warns users every time their account accesses a new service. […] In the next decade, the goal is to have a reputation on the privacy side as strong as we have in creating excellent and stable services"reads Zuckerberg's" letter ".
To those who say that Facebook is a private company with too much power, the CEO replies: "When it comes to important social problems, I don't think private companies need to be able to make so many decisions on their own. I don't think each platform has to decide individually which content or advertisements are allowed during the election or what is harmful in general. There should be a more democratic process to determine these aspects. […] That's why I asked for clearer regulation for our sector".
Turning to the services and products coming from Facebook, Zuckerberg highlights the implementation of end-to-end encryption on platforms such as WhatsApp and explains that other news will arrive by the end of the year.
The CEO is convinced that the time has come to give users more options when it comes to payments. For this reason, his company is working on WhatsApp Payments, a tool that allows you to "exchange" money quickly and easily, just as if you were sending a common photo. The first tests were carried out in India and seem to have been successful: the plan is clearly to expand this service almost everywhere and Zuckerberg says that he expects a lot of progress over the next six months.
His goal is to give small companies the same possibilities that historically have been granted only to large multinationals and, for this reason, his company is also working on services such as Facebook Marketplace, Instagram Shopping, Facebook Pay and Libra.
In addition to this, Zuckerberg says he is trying to achieve "the dream we've all had in the past 15 years": the definitive platform for augmented and virtual reality. The CEO declares that the real AR is still several years away, but has instead been achieved an important milestone in terms of VR thanks to Oculus Quest. For the uninitiated, we are talking about a virtual reality viewer operating in complete autonomy from the cost of 449 euros. For more information, we recommend that you take a look at our Oculus Quest review.
Zuckerberg says sales were beyond expectations and that $ 5 million worth of content was purchased on the Oculus Store only on Christmas 2019. The Facebook CEO is also keen to point out that important steps forward have been made regarding this viewer, from the introduction of hand tracking to the creation of Oculus Link, a device that allows access to Oculus Rift content through this viewer. We remind you that Facebook bought Oculus in 2014.
Moving on to augmented reality, Zuckerberg points out that Facebook has the most used platform of this type in the world: Spark AR. To be clear, this is the tool that is used to create filters that go viral on social networks such as Instagram.
The Facebook CEO says his company will continue to work on this too. To conclude the "letter", Zuckerberg declares that his goal for the next decade it is not to be appreciated, but to be understood. The CEO hopes to do this by communicating his company's principles more often.
