CanCon Podcast Ep. 114: Facebook still wants to be super creepy with your data

Here’s the thing: Facebook has had a not so great 2018. But when you’re a tech company that hosts an annual developer conference, sometimes the show must go on, even if there isn’t much to show for.

Facebook’s f8 conference announcements were mostly a collection of the mundane or expected (more stories and video chat!), indicating a tech company with either too many divisions working on the same thing, or one unwilling to announce important news until the heat dies down. Maybe both.

If I'm counting right, Facebook now has five apps you can use to video chat, four messaging apps, four inboxes, two ways to text with companies, and 100,000,000,000 ways to collect all your personal data

— David Pierce (@pierce) May 1, 2018

There was one big bet, however, and boy was it creepy. Or an automatic win and Facebook’s most natural product launch, depending on who you ask. I’ll say this: a company that responds to very loud privacy concerns with a product to find you a mate by sorting through your personal data is a company perhaps too big to fail (or stop).

This week finds Google stepping up to the plate with a developer conference all its own. The expectation for Google I/O is a streamlined performance from one of the world’s biggest tech companies, with fewer announcements presented in a tighter, more coherent package. Is it too much to hope that said coherent package contains an honest-to-god plan for messaging on Android? Slide into our DMs and tell us what you think.

Join us as the CanCon crew – Erin Bury, Eighty-Eight Managing Director; Patrick O’Rourke, MobileSyrup Managing Editor; and Douglas Soltys, BetaKit Editor-in-Chief – answers the question: what’s love got to do with it?