Zuckerberg's latest open letter: Using blockchain to provide a secure, stable, well-regulated cryptocurrency for billions of users

On July 25th, Beijing time, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an open letter on Facebook's personal homepage, sharing the company's latest achievements and vision for the last quarter, and talked about it. Libra, Facebook's newest project, describes a new, secure, stable, and well-regulated currency vision for billions of users around the world.

The following is the translation of the open letter ( English original ):

We just shared the latest community updates and quarterly results. More than 2.7 billion people use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger every month, and more than 2.1 billion people use our at least one service every day.

• Pon's Research Series: Analysis and Prevention Guide for Model Currency Principles
• Regulatory winds, centralized exchanges bear the brunt, can DEX take the wind?
• The real life of the owner of the exchange: the horror of the thief, the night can not linger

Our first priority is to solve the important social problems facing the Internet and our company. With our privacy-centric vision to build a digital living room and today's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settlement agreement, providing world-class privacy protection will be even more important to our future vision.

But I also believe that we have a responsibility to innovate and create new high-quality experiences that will bring people together in new ways. Therefore, I am committed to ensuring that we continue to implement our active roadmap while working to resolve important social issues. You can see our latest updates on Facebook and Instagram, our proposed new payment system and currency, our new virtual reality products, and the strength of our entire community.

As always, thank you for taking this journey with us. Our mission is to bring the world closer together, which is a difficult and important task. I thank each of you for your role in achieving this goal. You can read all the updates below me.

____

This is an important quarter for us. Our community and business continues to grow, with more than 2.7 billion people using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger each month, and more than 2.1 billion people use our at least one service every day.

We will continue to focus on the four priorities of this year – making progress on major social issues, building high quality new experiences, building our business, and communicating our claims more transparently. Today I will focus on our top priorities, but first I want to talk about recent news, and we have reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on privacy issues.

As part of the agreement, we agreed to pay a $5 billion fine. But more importantly, we are making some major changes to how to build our service and operations. This will require us to invest a lot of engineering resources to build tools to review our products and the way we use them. This will also significantly improve our accountability system, making the process of auditing our privacy controls more in line with the financial controls of listed companies in the Sarbanes Oxley Act. We must prove quarterly that we have fulfilled all our privacy commitments. Just as our board of directors has an audit committee to oversee our financial controls, our board will now also have a new privacy committee to oversee our privacy program and work with an independent privacy auditor to this new committee and federal trade. Committee report. We are inviting one of our most experienced leaders in the product field to be the Chief Privacy Officer of the product, reporting to me and managing our privacy program. We will also monitor developers who access data through our platform more rigorously. We expect these changes to work together to set a new standard for our industry.

This is a major shift for us. Every day, billions of people trust the services we create and use them to communicate with the people they care about. Privacy has always been important to the services we provide, and now it is even more important to our future social networking vision. The key is that we have to get it right, we have to build it into all our systems. It takes time to do this correctly, and I expect that we will take longer to release new products, especially when we start and run it. I also hope that, as we do in terms of safety and integrity, we will continue to identify and solve problems as we develop our systems. But our goal is to create the same strong privacy protection as the best service we offer, and this settlement agreement provides us with clear requirements.

____

Now, our company's top priority is to make progress on the major social issues facing the Internet, including privacy, elections, harmful content, data portability, and more. In all of these areas, I argue that the government will make clearer rules that will benefit the Internet. I believe that without a sound democratic process, it is unsustainable for private companies to make so many decisions on social issues. Either the correct regulatory measures are in place, or we expect the disappointment in our industry to continue to grow.

This quarter, I discussed with policy makers in Europe how to do this. I met with President Mark Long of France and discussed the framework of harmful content. I believe that in this area, Europe may have an effective public program led by an elected government, and there may be an industry standard and self-regulatory process in the United States.

But we will not wait for regulators to strengthen independent supervision. We have just released a third transparency report that shows our progress on many harmful content, including hate speech and pictorial violence, but also areas where we still need to do better, such as bullying and harassment. I believe that more companies should publish a transparency report listing the ubiquity of harmful content in their services. This will help companies and governments design better systems to deal with this problem. After next year, we will release these reports on a quarterly basis so that people can use the same rhythm to account for us like these earnings conference calls.

We are also advancing the plan to establish an independent content monitoring committee. I think it's important that people can appeal these decisions and we are building a transparent, trustworthy system. We've been working with free speech experts around the world, and we've got a lot of public opinions on how to achieve this goal, which we published in a report last month. We look forward to the establishment of this oversight committee by the end of this year.

We also continue to invest heavily in protecting elections, including taking more advanced measures, stopping uncoordinated misconduct, launching new advertising transparency tools, and building more fact-checking partnerships. Our opponents are getting more sophisticated, but recent elections in the EU and India have shown that our efforts are working. After the recent EU elections, the former President of the European Parliament stated that we have fulfilled our commitment to oppose the election intervention when I testified in the European Parliament. Thanks to our efforts, the election has become much cleaner on the Internet. As the US elections in 2020 approach, we will continue to build on these efforts and keep us in the lead.

____

Next, I know that there is a lot to discuss in terms of policy, but I also want to discuss our second priority – to provide a high quality new experience for our community. There are some efforts that make me particularly excited:

The first is our vision for the future of social networking – starting with security, privacy and interoperable information. Based on Messenger and WhatsApp, we are very focused on achieving this goal in the next five years.

With Messenger, we are rewriting our applications to make it the world's fastest and safest primary messaging platform, and we're working hard to make end-to-end encryption and reduce permanence the default for all conversations. On this basis, we begin to explore how private social platforms can be the center of your social experience, for example, integrating all your short stories from different applications into one place. We are still developing some features, such as watching videos together. This shows that video chat is a basic way of communication for all of us. It can be a platform that allows us to communicate privately in more ways in the future.

WhatsApp has incredibly strong privacy and performance, and we're more focused on building all the ways you want to interact in this digital living room. The state of WhatsApp is already the most popular instant story product in the world, and we continue to see good momentum. As millions of small businesses use the WhatsApp business, we are also developing new tools, such as product catalogs, for free use by entrepreneurs around the world. This is especially important as more and more small businesses do not have online services or use private messaging platforms such as WhatsApp as the primary means of interacting with customers.

This will connect to the next product area that I am very interested in, namely business and payment. These are huge and important areas, and we are working hard to provide a better quality experience than ever before in several major areas – from Instagram shopping to the Facebook market, to cross-application payments, to our recent 27 The company announced a new project in Libra. These efforts are important to our product experience and business. Once people connect to their networks on social platforms, one of the biggest problems is how we can help them create opportunities with the networks they create, and one of the best ways to do this is through business.

Instagram shopping will improve the browsing and shopping experience of your favorite brands and creators, while also providing emerging creators with a powerful new way to build business and maintain their communities. The Facebook Marketplace provides a way for people to buy and sell goods on a trusted network through real identity. Hundreds of millions of people use the Marketplace every month. We're also providing people with ways to interact with businesses through instant messaging, such as WhatsApp Business, because people don't like to call businesses, and if they want, they prefer to interact asynchronously via messages.

Payment is one of the things that makes me particularly excited. When I see that we can make private interactions easier, in the long run, payment may be the most important. We will continue to test the payment function of WhatsApp in India and will launch it in other countries. In the future, we will allow people to use the same payment account, transfer money to friends and businesses on WhatsApp, shop on Instagram, or trade on Facebook. Being able to send money as easily as sending a photo will open up new opportunities for the business.

More broadly, I believe there is an opportunity to help more people get financial tools. Last month, we announced that we are working with 27 other organizations to form the Libra Association. The association will create a new currency called Libra that will be powered by blockchain technology. The Libra Association will be independent of Facebook or any other member, but we plan to support this currency in our services. The goal is to enable billions of people around the world who use services such as WhatsApp, but who may be excluded from banking services, to use a secure, stable, well-regulated cryptocurrency. There are many possibilities here, and both the Facebook and Libra associations plan to work with regulators to help them resolve all concerns before Libra is ready to launch. We worked with other potential members of the association to publish a white paper in advance that clearly outlines the concept of Libra so that we can address these important issues in public, and we are committed to working with policy makers to resolve this issue. it is good.

The third product area I want to emphasize is that we focus on providing a better quality experience than today's on a future computing platform for enhancement and virtual reality.

This quarter, we launched Oculus Quest, our first wireless, fully free-moving all-in-one headset. It is well rated and we are selling at the fastest speed. More importantly, we offer an experience that people use every week and buy more content. There is still a lot of work to do to develop this ecosystem and deliver our dream future VR and AR products, but this is an important milestone. In a few years, we have upgraded the original Rift costing $600 and needing a $1,000 custom PC to a Quest that now costs $400 in total, which is a great experience in many ways. There will be more innovations in the next few years, and now we have a platform on which we will continue to move forward.

Augmented reality and virtual reality provide a better quality experience than traditional computing platforms because they provide a sense of presence—you are actually with another person, or in another place. The sense of presence is important to social interaction and how we interact with others as a person. Even if it takes longer than we expected, I still believe that this will be one of our most important contributions to the way we use technology for a long time.

____

These are the latest developments in my work on the major social issues we face and the experience of building new products. We have made great progress this quarter and there are still many in the future. Our business continues to perform well, and Cheryl will discuss this later.

But this is also an important quarter, because now we have a clearer path forward – not only in terms of products and business, but also in terms of regulatory guidance, which sets clear expectations for us and lays down for us. basis.

We will continue to update Blocking; if you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us!