One of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s New Year’s resolutions this year is to host regular public discussions on social media about technology and society.
That is why, in an almost two-hour long interview with Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain, Zuckerberg admitted something in relation to his goal: that he “definitely [doesn’t] want a society where there’s a camera in everyone’s living room.”
Critics have deemed his statement to be quite ironic, considering that Facebook is not exactly known for being discreet about getting its users’ private information. In relation to this, Zuckerberg also said that Facebook is not going to give people the option to pay not to have their private information gathered and sold “because it wouldn’t be fair to those that can’t afford it.”
He said to Zittrain, “Are we going to let people pay to have different controls on data use than other people? And my answer to that is a hard no.” Zuckerberg adds, “If I could buy my way out of ads and data collection, it wouldn’t be fair to those who can’t.”
Additionally, the statement becomes even weirder when you realize that Facebook is actually selling cameras for people’s living rooms. The social networking company just launched its first consumer gadget, Portal, in October of last year. Portal is a video-calling device equipped with the Amazon Alexa voice assistant. To be fair, though, Facebook has already clarified before that video calls made through Portal are encrypted, and Facebook neither sees nor stores any information on it whatsoever.
