On Tuesday April 30th, 2019, Facebook’s annual F8 conference 2019 will hear the keynote delivered by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, streamed live for an hour on a dedicated website f8.com.
The livestream begins at the following time:
- 10.00 AM – Los Angeles
- 11.00 AM – Houston
- 12.00 AM – New York
- 6.00 PM – London
- 7.00 PM – Berlin
- 3.00AM (May 1st) – Sydney
Go here at the correct time > f8.com
It’s thought that Zuckerberg will attempt to reclaim some goodwill after a year of hell, when the social media giant came under the microscope and then severe criticism from users, media, digital rights groups, politicians, regulators, and competitions, often for disparate and contradictory reasons.
Facebook’s business was as usual: to recklessly collect personal data from billions of people and them use and abuse it as seen fit, coupled with and lax security. All this finally came to bite the social media giant, who had to grapple with thousands of pages of leaked documents, initiatives to spin off its components into separate companies and calls to simultaneous police one kind of speech even more stringently – and never police other kinds of speech at all.
This has all become the grim everyday reality for what was once a Silicon Valley poster child that couldn’t do wrong. And Zuckerberg will tomorrow try to fix it by persuading his many detractors of various profiles in high places, and keeping the 2.3 billion active daily users from around the world happy – and it will be an interesting balancing act to try to pull.
Rumors ahead of the developer conference speculated that more “privacy” the Facebook way may be coming via the linking of a person’s identity into a combined end-to-end encrypted messaging behemoth that encompasses WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, the company’s flagship applications.
Another rumor is that Facebook might end up ultimately undermining its users’ privacy even more by offering more convenience: namely, a competitor to Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant: after all, who better to monitor one’s every move and record one’s every word than Facebook.
Lastly, the conference will deal with the Augmented Reality (AR), i.e., Oculus part of the company’s business, along with the ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence (AI) uses, and Facebook’s own cryptocurrency, apparently spawned via its blockchain efforts.
