Last week, Mark Zuckerberg published an ad in newspapers stating Facebook doesn't deserve your trust if they can't protect your information, and he has now stated that "Facebook is the true source of the problem."
In what has come as shock even greater than Australian cricketers engaging in ball tampering is the news this morning that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has decided that the only way to save the village that is Facebook, in the greatest of American traditions, is to destroy it.
In Zuckerberg's apology last week, he stated that a quiz app from 2014 "leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014," and said it was a breach of trust.
However, in his new explanation, Zuckerberg states "This was a breach of trust, and I'm sorry we didn't do more at the time. We're now taking steps to make sure this doesn't happen again, and then only way we know how to do this is to shut Facebook down once and for all."
{loadposition alex08}Zuckerberg's new notice continues: "We realised that we've already stopped apps like this from getting so much information, but that limiting the data apps get when you sign in using Facebook isn't enough.
"We've investigated every single app that had access to large amounts of data before we thought we fixed this. We always knew there were others, we designed Facebook to collect information, but with so much data breached, we realised we can only ban ourselves, and apologise to everyone affected.
"Finally, we're reminding you of which apps you've given access to your information - which is all of them - so we're shutting ourselves off so your privacy can't be breached any more, not by us ever again.
"We can't speak for Google, or Microsoft, or Twitter, or the NSA, or China, Russia or anyone else, but we will not be the company that turns privacy into dust, and we sincerely apologise for letting you down time and again for so many years.
"Thank you for believing in this community. I promised to do better for you, and now I'm delivering - by shutting down Facebook for good."
Zuckerberg's self-sacrifice will surely be seen as a great act of technological martyrdom, with the great matrix of perennially exposed private information that is Facebook to be returned to its users, and then shut down forever - after 30 days.
The 30 day timeframe is designed to allow users time to download their photos, posts and all other information before Facebook is permanently deleted from the Internet.
We're told that the Facebook homepage itself will remain a monument to the words of the late, great Steve Jobs, who said at WSJ's All Things Digital conference in 2010 the following:
Steve Jobs said: "Silicon Valley is not monolithic. We’ve always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleagues in the Valley.
"Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for, in plain English, and repeatedly.
"I’m an optimist; I believe people are smart, and some people want to share more data than other people do.
"Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data.
"A lot of people in the Valley think we’re really old-fashioned about this, and maybe we are, but we worry about stuff like this."
Mark Zuckerberg has announced there is only one possible way to resurrect Facebook and to keep it alive, and that is by visiting Zuckerberg's own Facebook page here and posting a message of support.
Should one billion such messages be received by 11.59am today in the appropriate timezones around the world on this first day of the fourth month of 2018, Facebook may well be saved, but its fate now lies with its users.
If the one billion messages aren't received by the appropriate timeframe, we'll all be April Fools.
