After the controversies surrounding Meta, Facebook’s parent company, over private data in recent months, Mark Zuckerberg himself has now advised users of his main services -Instagram and Facebook Messenger- to do not take screenshots of your conversations to maintain your privacy and that of your contacts.
Some messaging applications allow you to send temporary text messages, which disappear after being sent. These types of communications are used to further protect the security of our conversations, and capturing them jeopardizes your warranty. That is why the CEO, increasingly focused on protecting the users of his applications, advises avoiding them.
What’s more, Zuckerberg wants to implement a tool that alerts users of their platforms when one of their contacts has taken a screenshot in a chat.
This is nothing more than an extra security measure that will be provided to users in order for them to have proof of their messages, since they may be being captured or released. A notice will appear in the chat at the time of the screenshot.
But the truth is that the Meta security measures are not foolproof, far from it. Facebook and Instagram can’t tell if a user is photographing the chat with an external camera, but this feature would undoubtedly be an important step for Meta to ensure the safety of its users.
Zuckerberg himself was in charge of announcing the new future tool through his social networks. “New update for end-to-end encrypted Messenger chats so you get notified if someone catches a message that goes missing,” the CEO said. He says they’re also “adding GIFs, stickers, and reactions to encrypted chats.”
Europe doubles down on Zuckerberg
These announcements by the CEO of Meta occur in the midst of an advance by the company before the European Union in the face of the impossibility of transferring data from European users due to a court ruling that prevents it from transferring data from European users to its headquarters in United States (USA).
The French government recently responded with a “so what?” to the threat of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram to close its services in the EU countries.
“So what? Our only compass, the one that guides the Government’s action, the action of the European bodies, is to enforce the democratic collective decisions of European citizens,” said the Secretary of State for Digital Transition and Electronic Communications , Cedric O.
Or spoke at the conference “Build European digital sovereignty”organized in Paris in the framework of the French rotating presidency of the Council of the EU.
Among the collective decisions mentioned is “data protection and the general data protection regulation,” he stressed.
In its latest report before the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the US company explained that the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) of July 16, 2020 could have consequences for your “ability to provide services”.
If we are not allowed to transfer data between countries and regions in which we operate, or if we are restricted from sharing data between our products and services, the ability to provide our services could be affected. Mark Zuckerberg.
The fundamental reason for this possible “affectation” on its services is the difficulty that the greater privacy restrictions entail in being able to personalize “online” advertisements, which is Meta’s main source of income.