If I was not married, Mark Zuckerberg is literally the last person on Earth I would want knowing about my dating habits:
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the keynote address at the F8 developer conference in San Jose on Tuesday, introducing, among other innovations, the company’s new dating features.
“We are announcing a new set of features coming soon around dating,” Zuckerberg told conference attendees, lamenting that his company has been late to the dating game.
“This is going to be for building real, long-term relationships, not just hookups,” he declared.
Zuckerberg didn’t explain how he plans to prevent “hookups,” but he did say that the dating service will be “opt-in” and “if you want you can make a dating profile. We have designed this with privacy and safety in mind from the beginning,” he assured conference attendees. “We’re excited to start rolling this out soon.” He assured users that no one will see their information without express permission. Instead, he said, Facebook will suggest possible dating prospects.
I’m too old and too-long married to have any experience with online dating of any kind, but I do know that the more sensitive the data is, the less I am interested in making it available to Facebook. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was already selling the information on status updates to divorce lawyers and the IRS.
Meanwhile, Facebook is also implementing a system to better suppress the public’s access to the news it does not want them to see.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company has already begun to implement a system that ranks news organizations based on trustworthiness, and promotes or suppresses its content based on that metric.
Zuckerberg said the company has gathered data on how consumers perceive news brands by asking them to identify whether they have heard of various publications and if they trust them.
“We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we’re going to dial up the intensity of that over time,” he said. “We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.”