How can you tell if Mark Zuckerberg is lying?

That's easy.

You can tell that he is lying if his lips are moving.

As such, I am highly dubious of any promise that makes, particularly if he is promising enhanced privacy:

If you click enough times through the website of Saudi Aramco, the largest oil producer in the world, you’ll reach a quiet section called “Addressing the climate challenge.” In this part of the website, the fossil fuel monolith claims, “Our contributions to the climate challenge are tangible expressions of our ethos, supported by company policies, of conducting our business in a way that addresses the climate challenge.” This is meaningless, of course — as is the announcement Mark Zuckerberg made today about his newfound “privacy-focused vision for social networking.” Don’t be fooled by either.

………

And so here we are: “As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms,” Zuckerberg writes in his road-to-Damascus revelation about personal privacy. The roughly 3,000-word manifesto reads as though Facebook is fundamentally realigning itself as a privacy champion — a company that will no longer track what you read, buy, see, watch, and hear in order to sell companies the opportunity to intervene in your future acts. But, it turns out, the new “privacy-focused” Facebook involves only one change: the enabling of end-to-end encryption across the company’s instant messaging services. Such a tech shift would prevent anyone, even Facebook, outside of chat participants from reading your messages.

That’s it.

Although the move is laudable — and will be a boon for dissident Facebook chatters in countries where government surveillance is a real, perpetual risk — promising to someday soon forfeit to your ability to eavesdrop on over 2 billion people doesn’t exactly make you eligible for sainthood in 2019. It doesn’t help that Zuckerberg’s post is completely absent of details beyond a plan to implement these encryption changes “over the next few years” — which is particularly silly considering Facebook has yet to implement privacy features promised in the wake of its previous mega-scandals.

Not only has Zuckerberg issued similar mea culpas over the years, he has done so on something resembling an annual basis.

These promises have never correlated to meaningful changes in behavior.