Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Plans to Leverage Blockchain for Secured Logins

Although there have been several reports in the past of Facebook working on the application of blockchain technology, for the first time company CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke openly on leveraging the technology.

In a recent interview with Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain, Zuckerberg hinted that they are planning to integrate the blockchain technology for Facebook login and data sharing systems. He says that it will also help users better control on other applications which access their data, pages and profiles.

Zuckerberg also stated that he is “potentially interested” in using the blockchain technology for the authentication of third-party apps. Zuckerberg admitted that complete decentralization of the Facebook platform won’t be possible, but stated that certain use-cases of personal data can be transformed on the blockchain.

While speaking on the issue of complete decentralization, Zuckerberg said: “if you have a fully distributed system, it dramatically empowers individuals on one hand but … it raises the question of consent and how people can really know that they’re giving consent to an institution. In some ways, it’s a lot easier to regulate and hold accountable larger companies. … I think this is a really interesting social question.”

He stated that blockchain can help replace Facebook Connect with “something that’s fully distributed”. However, he is still figuring out the ways to do it. “Basically, you take your information, you store it on some decentralized system and you have the choice to log into places without going through an intermediary,” he said.

He said that getting rid of intermediaries will help developers to build features and applications without worrying about losing access to users.

“For developers, one of the things that is really troubling about working with our system, or Google’s system for that matter, or having to deliver services through Apple’s App Store is that you don’t want to have an intermediary between serving the people who are using your service and you. Where someone can just say hey, we as a developer have to follow your policy and if we don’t, then you can cut off access to the people we are serving. That’s kind of a difficult and troubling position to be in,” said Zuckerberg.

During the peak of the crypto market in early 2018, Zuckerberg said that he would be studying the technology behind blockchain. Since, then the company has also formed a blockchain division with a staff of over 50 recruited till now.

Although better said that done, Zuckerberg notes that implementation of blockchain will be certainly a challenging task. He said: “Certainly the level of computation that Facebook is doing is really intense to do in a distributed way. Decentralized things that are computationally intensive will be harder. They’re harder to do computation on, but eventually, maybe you have the resources to do that.”