Facebook Data Scandal Delays Home Speaker Debut at Annual Developer Conference

Mark Zuckerberg
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Public outrage has dampened any potential excitement surrounding Facebook’s latest way of mining your household for information.

The house that Zuckerberg built is shaking on its foundations in the wake of its recent scandal. After hemorrhaging more than $70 billion in 10 days, the social media giant is watching users exit en masse, alongside brands like Playboy and fellow entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla deleting their pages. Even WhatsApp founder Brian Acton has declared that “it’s time.”

Now, during its May developer conference, Facebook will tuck their proverbial tail between their legs. Originally intended to unveil their new intelligent home speaker system, the Amazon Echo-esque product will instead be conspicuously absent. Zuckerberg himself will take part in an entirely different sort of presentation when he is compelled to testify before Congress about the breach of privacy.

Instead, Facebook will use their time on stage to explain how they will restrict the information that Facebook app creators are allowed to harvest from their users in order to “maintain the trust people place in Facebook.” A recent blog post said that while the changes were “not easy” to make, they would “mitigate any breach of trust with the broader developer ecosystem.

Good luck with that, Mark.

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