Why Is Facebook About to Launch Thousands of Drones?

In a so-called effort to “connect the whole world,” Facebook announced plans Wednesday to launch thousands of internet-beaming drones.

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Speaking at the Commercial UAV Show in London, Facebook engineer Andrew Cox said the company will have “thousands” of aircraft within the next 15 years.

“We have a systems architecture team that’s developing this, and we have 35 to 40 countries we’re looking at right now,” Cox, a chief engineer working on Facebook’s solar-powered Aquila drone, told the audience at the conference.

But while the plans come within Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s grandiose vision to “make affordable access to basic internet services available to every person in the world,” others are more skeptical.

Transparency advocate David Sasaki argued Facebook’s efforts to extend internet access “to everyone in the world” are driven by commercial – not charitable –interests.

“When Zuckerberg says that access to the internet is a human right, what he means is that access to Facebook should be a human right,” he wrote in a blog published shortly after the unveiling of the Internet.org foundation, a not-for-profit organization which runs the Facebook Connectivity Lab.

Since Facebook launched in 2004, it has drawn widespread criticism for abuses of privacy. China, the world's most populous country, has blocked the site.