Is Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Merging A Threat To Your Privacy?

WhatsApp. Instagram. Facebook Messenger. Each play quite a significant role in our daily lives. You can hardly go out for dinner without people checking in at the restuarant or putting up an Instagram post or uploading a WhatsApp status. We are defined by a culture of likes, tweets and snaps which is also very distracting (to say the least).  

And now we may witness another era of a revolution because Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is looking forward to merge the social media platform’s biggest and most-used services. And if the company’s major messaging services like Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger do come together, it’ll allow all the users to chat with each other irrespective of the platform they’re using. That means if you’re a Facebook user, you can easily send an encrypted message to anyone who has only a WhatsApp account. Now are you actually looking forward to this huge step or is it making you nervous? And before you freak out, we would like to mention that the three services will continue as stand-alone apps as well.

But remember WhatApp’s end-to-end encryption? Yes, the hallmark of users’ security may go for a toss if Facebook integrates the popular mobile messaging platform with not-that-secure Instagram and Messenger. Even though Zuckerberg has ordered the other apps to adopt end-to-end encryption, the integration might induce some kind of compromise to its security. Because WhatsApp is mostly personal, anonymity is a big part of Instagram and for Facebook, you must sign in with your real name. Keeping that in mind, it’s quite unclear how Facebook plans to approach the integration of the three virtual worlds.

A planned launch for the message across services is set for 2020 – though of course whether that happens or not remains to be seen.