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Reasonably Accurate 🤖🧠 Transcript
Morning everybody. How are you doing today? In this episode of the show, we're gonna talk about Facebook's F eight conference and Information management. Now, you've probably seen a bunch of headlines about Facebook's F eight conference specifically about the keynote from Mark Zuckerberg and a number of key Facebook leaders.
And of course, there's some really interesting highlights, there's some new Oculus VR headwear. Um There is a brand new design look uh for Facebook that there dubbing FB eight. There are some cool new features in Instagram. Uh They're debating taking away visible likes on Instagram so you won't see the actual counts.
Um There's a whole bunch of little tiny features here and there. But the biggest theme and the biggest takeaway is Facebook is saying I'll repeat that Facebook is saying all the right things about privacy, you know, after they've had year after year after year of scandal, after scandal after scandal around not really respecting our privacy.
So they're saying all the right things the messaging is on point and really what it boils down to is that they see the world in two ways. Now having a public town square and private living rooms. Welcome to F Eight. Today, we are going to talk about building a privacy focused social platform.
So the basic idea here is that, you know, in all of our lives, we have our, our public spaces like our town squares and we have our private spaces like our living rooms and in our digital lives, we also need both public and private spaces. And their idea is that they built out the Town Square, they've built out the Digital Town Square where people can exchange ideas and meet other people.
But the behaviors in the Town Square are very different than what you would do in your living room. They want to enable you to connect in the living room. Now, part of this is the push back from all the scandals. Part of this is the growth of Messenger and whatsapp and Insta messaging.
But really, it's also a reflection on competition from Apple's iMessage and other factors that are sort of pushing people into smaller spaces. And it turns out, you know, as much as we said, this is super cool. We can all connect on these massive global networks with millions and millions of people.
Really, it comes back to Dunbar's number with 150 friends and who's really meaningful to you is that a group that you belong with? Is that your close friend? Is that your work life, your sports team, there are these smaller groups. So Facebook continue to hit on the message time after time, public Town Square private living rooms.
And that totally makes sense. That's all what we wanted to hear. And that would be a wonderful thing if we had these digital spaces where we could assure ourselves of the security and privacy of this living room idea while sharing what we want, presenting what we want to the world out in the Town Square.
Now, there's been lots of ana uh analysis about these announcements um about these specific product announcements. Um But the key takeaway and what I want to dive into here is the timelines. Um So, uh Mark Zuckerberg said that this is all gonna take years and everything they pretty much announced was in the future.
The, the mobile app got redesigned and pushed out for some folks in the US and Canada. Um And they're going to see that this week, but a lot of the stuff that they announced is coming on the next few months um by the or by the end of the year.
So it's all forward looking. But a few of the things that jumped out um specifically around messaging, they said it's going to take years to do years. So the specifically one of the ideas that I want to talk about and it ties to information management, it ties to your organization is around the unification of their three major messaging products.
So, right now on Facebook, you can use um Facebook messenger to talk to each other in groups or individually, you can use whatsapp, which used to be a separate product. But now it's just a Facebook product line. And then Instagram D MS and they're going to unify all three of these on a common messaging platform.
They're going to adopt a lot of the principles of whatsapp. And the biggest one of those is end to end encryption. And the idea behind end to end encryption is that my device has a key, your device has a key. And if we encrypt on this device, only encrypted traffic goes to your device where you can then decrypt it.
So that only access by device to device or user account to user account has the access to these messages. So that nobody between whether and this was the line from Facebook, whether hackers government or even themselves, nobody could access that conversation. And that's a really good thing though.
We've seen some significant challenges with whatsapp specifically in India around misinformation spreading through these venues as well because obviously you can open up a conversation with other people besides the people, you know, and that conversation itself is encrypted, which means it also can't be monitored.
But specifically Zuckerberg started to talk about um the difficulties of overhauling all of this infrastructure. There's two plus billion people on Facebook, they all have messenger. Um This is gonna take a long time, but I thought it was really, really fascinating because it brings up this sort of bigger issue.
Can you take a infrastructure that was not designed to isolate information and to manage information properly or in a way that respected privacy in the stance you now want, let me rephrase that because that came out awkwardly designing originally an infrastructure that says anybody inside can access all this data and do analytics, do research things like that.
So basically an open book to internal Facebook teams and now overhauling it to say you can't access this data at all or under these very strict controls is only when you can access that data, that's a huge undertaking. And in fact, it's something that most of us have missed and impacts us all um more than we realize.
So we saw this popular or not popular, but it's sort of widespread um in the last few years leading up to GDPR, the requirements around GDPR to be able to account to eu citizens if you have their data and who had access to it kind of blew a lot of people out of the water.
And so like what I need to be to tell you who can access this data and where it is. And essentially a lot of the answers I got from organizations was, yeah, anyone inside our organization can access this data because there's very little separation or isolation built in from the forefront and tying that directly to cybersecurity.
We don't know the level of information, a lot of the time that's in our organization or have any controls around providing or preventing beyond inside outside. That's basically the situation Facebook is in, you're inside or you're outside. Um And then they've layered access controls on top of it for the user population, but not internally in the teams and they have to adjust that they're gonna go under uh undergo a fundamental restructuring.
Now, the advantage is they already have whatsapp with hundreds of millions of users there on this type of infrastructure. But it's a really fascinating problem. So let's put that aside for a second. Why do you care? So besides the Facebook case, uh obviously, you know, most of us are on Facebook and we care from that perspective, Facebook has an uh uh an oddly disproportionate influence on how we view the digital Domain.
But I think the lesson here is absolutely critical for every organization. You are handling a ton of information and right now you're probably mishandling it without even knowing it. You have really broad user permissions to that data when people don't need to access it, right? And there's a ton of products that are built around providing this access to people and opening things up to run all sorts of cool machine learning models, providing people insights.
And the general view is, hey, everybody should have access to this data inside outside. But I think you need to be far more granular than that not just for privacy. See, there's privacy and data trust concerns around there, but also just from a security perspective, you shouldn't have just one level you're in or you're out or three levels you're in, you're out or you're in the inner circle, you need to be able to account for who can access data when and where, what systems can access data and under what circumstances because that's the only way you can then go about protecting it.
If you don't know what you're protecting and what's actually important and what levels of importance the organization and the business assigned to that. How could you ever protect that information properly? You're missing critical metadata about your data to make security decisions? Basically, you're shooting in the dark saying, you know what, everything's priority one and as we all know, if everything's priority one, nothing is priority one.
So little food for thought today. How does your organization handle? Information management? Do you have formalized information management? If you go talk to random employees, random teams, do they know how to classify information? Do they know against? What structure do they know how to evaluate whether something they've created is sensitive, whether it can be shared under what circumstances can be shared?
All this stuff should be built into our cultures and it's not Facebook is going to be a very public example of a very difficult culture change that hopefully we'll be able to see. Mark Zuckerberg promised transparency. I don't know if we'll get it to that level because it is not going to be pretty over this uh next few years.
I hope they are successful because I think the vision they're pitching is wonderful. Um Whether it's going to be reality or not is a question for another day. Let me know online. Hit me up at Mark NC A for those of you in the vlogs in the comments down below.
And as always by email me at Markan dot C A hope you're set up for a fantastic day and I'll see you on the next episode of the show.
