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Menlo Park – Facebook wants its chat services like WhatsApp and Messenger, according to media reports in the background, to merge and secure more with encryption. The online network has at least confirmed to the New York Times and the Financial Times that there were considerations in this direction. "We are working to provide more of our messaging services with end-to-end encryption and to explore ways to make friends and family easier across the borders of different networks," a spokesman told the newspapers. There are currently internal discussions on how best to implement this.
According to the plans, different applications will still be offered to users – but the applications would run on a common technical infrastructure, the two newspapers wrote, citing stakeholders. Until now, systems are widely separated.
WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram link
On the common technical platform would be added, next to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, the communication function of the Instagram photo service. In the future, for example, you may be able to send a message directly from Instagram to WhatsApp.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will personally drive the conversion plan. The founders of WhatsApp and Instagram, who were largely independent after the takeover by Facebook, had all left the network online last year. There are reports that there is tension with Zuckerberg, who has become more involved in service management.
More than one billion users per service
The three services each have more than one billion users. Facebook as an online network has more than 2.2 billion active members – but growth has slowed significantly recently, while chat services are widely used.
Resistance of the security authorities
End-to-end encryption, in which only parties to the conversation have access to the content of a conversation, currently only uses WhatsApp in the default Facebook world. With Facebook Messenger, you can connect them to exchange confidential information. When the founders of WhatsApp, Brian Acton and Jan Koum, left, they said they had to oppose anti-encryption plans. End-to-end encryption – which also uses other chat services, such as Apple's Signal, Wire, or Apple's iMessage by default – also meets with security agencies such as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). is even worse to hear from suspects.
A former Facebook director told the Financial Times that Zuckerberg wanted to badociate various services of the group to a kind of "Whatstabook" to stimulate growth. While encryption would improve data protection, the real goal of Facebook is probably to get more contact information to find new potential users, he said.
Originally, user data should remain separate
A common infrastructure would mean a profound interference in the functioning of the services concerned today. So WhatsApp is designed from the beginning to capture less user data and only requires the phone number of the smartphone. On Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Instagram, however, users create accounts.
One of the promises made by WhatsApp for the last $ 22 billion in 2014 was that user data remained separate. A few years later, Facebook announced that it wanted to match the phone numbers between WhatsApp and Facebook. This would, for example, find WhatsApp users on Facebook. The idea met the opposition of privacy advocates and was suspended in Europe. The European Commission has canceled Facebook in 2017 with a fine of 110 million euros, because the online network had claimed the registration of the acquisition, but the sharing of data between the two systems has Was not technically possible.
Political pressure
Pooling the technical infrastructure behind the chat functions would at the same time make it more difficult to dissociate Facebook. In politics, especially since the data scandal in Cambridge, Analytica repeatedly claims that Facebook must be forced to separate from courier services. According to media reports, US Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna said that the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp would have been much more difficult in competition law. "Imagine how different the world would be if Facebook were to compete with WhatsApp and Instagram," he writes on Twitter.
Facebook is trying to change the policy. Executive Director Sheryl Sandberg had just toured Europe, including a visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Zuckerberg defended Facebook's business model Friday in a guest article from the "Wall Street Journal" read in political Washington. (AWP / mc / pg)
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