Facebook must clean itself up before it dives into any ambitious new schemes | thearticle

The non-profit Libra Association revealed itself to the world on Tuesday and announced it will launch a new cryptocurrency. Members of the alliance included some of the biggest names in tech

and finance such as PayPal, Mastercard and Visa. However, it is the lead company that is understandably getting most of the attention – Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote: “We aspire to

make it easy for everyone to send and receive money just like you use our apps to instantly share messages and photos.” He explained that there would be a Libra digital wallet which will be

available in WhatsApp and Messenger, as well as being a standalone app. It will launch sometime 2020. Improving access to finance for under-served people around the world is a worthy cause.

But I’m not sure Facebook is the right company to do it. The social media giant is mired in a host of privacy scandals that cast a huge shadow over its latest announcement. Zuckerberg tried

to assuage these fears in his post yesterday. He said that the Libra cryptocurrency is built on “blockchain technology. It’s decentralised – meaning it’s run by many different organisations

instead of just one, making the system fairer overall. It’s available to anyone with an internet connection and has low fees and costs.” He also said it will be regulated in the same way as

other payment providers. Hammering home the point, he explained that Libra is “secured by cryptography which helps keep your money safe.” He said this was “an important part of our vision

for a privacy-focused social platform” that he announced at the firm’s F8 conference earlier in the year. Central to this is the promise that the information that users share with subsidiary

company running the currency, Calibra, will be separated from information shared with Facebook. The problem is, nobody is really buying any of this. Using blockchain technology does give

some reassurance over security and privacy – the system is decentralised by design. But given its history, it remains difficult to take Facebook’s claims seriously, however secure, private

and separate they say the new service will be. Let’s not forget, this is the company that as recently as April admitted it had stored millions of Facebook users’ passwords in plaintext

instead of encrypting them as they should have done. The same company that has proved itself unwilling and incapable of dealing with fake news time after time. Do we really think it can deal

with fraud and all the other complexities conducting financial transactions throws up? And it’s all very well Zuckerberg talking about the importance of regulation, but he is the same man

that refused to answer questions from global politicians who assembled in the House of Commons. Ultimately, Facebook’s so-called pivot-to-privacy came far too late, the distrust is too

deeply embedded. Zuckerberg tried to paint the picture of a utopian world where, thanks to Facebook – sorry, Calibra – people can pay “bills with the push of a button” or buy “coffee with

the scan of code”. You will even be able to use the cryptocurrency to travel on public transport, he said. Never mind that in the UK we can do many of these things with our phones already,

and that services like Apple Pay are expanding and are secure, it is worth stopping to ask if this is really what we want Facebook to be doing. Before it dives into anything else, Facebook 

should be focusing on providing a better, more secure, more trustworthy social network. Finance is changing, we see that in way startup banks like Monzo and services like TransferWise have

really taken off, and Facebook unsurprisingly wants a piece of that action. It has a ‘population’ the same or greater than many countries, so why not have a currency? I suspect I’m not the

only one nervous at the prospect.