Dearly beloved, our reading this morning is taken from the latest Epistle of St Mark to the schmucks – as members of his 2.3 billion-strong Church of Facebook are known. The purpose of the epistle is to outline a new “vision” that St Mark has for the future of privacy, a subject that is very close to his wallet – which is understandable, given that he has acquired an unconscionable fortune from undermining it.

“As I think about the future of the internet,” he writes (revealingly conflating his church with the infrastructure on which it runs), “I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms. Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks.”

Quite so. But nowadays, Zuckerberg continues, “we already see that private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication. There are a number of reasons for this. Many people prefer the intimacy of communicating one-on-one or with just a few friends. People are more cautious of having a permanent record of what they’ve shared. And we all expect to be able to do things like payments privately and securely.”

Accordingly, he announces a grand plan: he’s going to integrate all Facebook’s messaging apps – WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram Direct – into a single, end-to-end encrypted network. (WhatsApp is already encrypted.) That way the content of messages will be protected from the inquisitive eyes of authoritarian snoopers and online criminals – as well as from Facebook itself.

This latest “pivot” (the tech term for a swerve) by the Facebook pontiff has taken the world by surprise. Investors don’t seem to be spooked by it – the share price hardly moved. This could be because ye olde Facebook service – the money pump that enables people to make fools of themselves in public while receiving targeted ads and curated newsfeed – will continue alongside the heavily encrypted messaging system. Or perhaps they believe that Zuckerberg has found a way to monetise the metadata from encrypted messaging. PR practitioners, on the other hand, saw it as a stroke of genius: a company that has attracted so much odium for playing fast and loose with users’ privacy suddenly becomes the global champion of encrypted privacy. What’s not to like?

Observers of a suspicious turn of mind see the pivot in less edifying lights. This columnist, for example, interprets it as a recognition by St Mark that the exponentially increasing costs of “moderating” Facebook content will eventually become unsupportable. But if much of that content morphs into encrypted messaging then, all of a sudden, Facebook can no longer be held accountable for it – and much of the cost of “moderation” evaporates. So the pivot is a way of getting a huge PR win while saving a ton of money.

Another, even more cynical, interpretation views the move as a pre-emptive strike against anti-trust action. Everywhere one looks at the moment, politicians (such as senator Elizabeth Warren in the US) are beginning to talk about breaking up the big tech companies. They are beginning to ask why Google should be allowed to own YouTube, or Facebook to own both WhatsApp and Instagram as well as its own in-house Messenger app. Melding the three together into a single encrypted omelette will make the task of antitrust disassembly all the more difficult – and perhaps unappealing to regulators.

The most interesting implications, though, are longer term ones. Suppose, for example, that the project succeeds and the communications of 2.3 billion people are rendered completely inaccessible to law enforcement, regulators and intelligence agencies. Because, remember, end-to-end encryption of the kind envisaged means that nobody, including Facebook, has a key to decrypt the messages.

If that happens, we will enter a new phase of the crypto wars that have raged for decades. As Bruce Schneier, the security guru, puts it: “On one side is law enforcement, which wants to be able to break encryption, to access devices and communications of terrorists and criminals. On the other are almost every cryptographer and computer security expert, repeatedly explaining that there’s no way to provide this capability without also weakening the security of every user of those devices and communications systems.” A “backdoor” for law enforcement, in other words, inevitably becomes an entry point for more unsavoury snoopers.

At the moment, we already have this problem with WhatsApp, which has been stoking tension and causing havoc in India and Brazil, to name just two theatres of ethnic or political warfare. Zuckerberg’s sanctimonious cant about privacy, and his apparent determination to extend unbreakable encryption to a significant fraction of humanity, will make recent crises look like tea parties and take us into wholly uncharted waters. But then this is par for the course with him. His original mantra, remember, was “move fast and break things”. He’s still doing it.

What I’m reading

Slaves to the algorithms
A salutary Medium essay by Kartik Hosanagar on the extent to which human agency is already compromised by algorithms makes for uncomfortable reading.

The personal is political
Martin Tisne argues in Technology Review that seeking to own our personal data leads to a dead end in a networked world. What we need, instead, are rights over how our data is used.

Hats off to the Model T
There’s a lovely essay by Lama Al Rajih online about how the introduction of Ford’s Model T led to the decline of formal headgear.