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Facebook's Plan To Merge WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger Sounds a Privacy Alarm (technologyreview.com)
Facebook's new plan to integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger will lead to more data about users being shared between them, a new report warns. The effort to make it easier for people to participate in conversations across its various messaging platforms sounds harmless, but it raises issues about how data will be shared across the platforms, and with third parties. The good news is that the apps will all be required to use end-to-end encryption. MIT Technology Review reports: Facebook says it wants to make it easier for people to communicate across its "ecosystem" of apps. But the real driver here is a commercial one. By making it easier to swap messages, Facebook can mine even more data to target ads with, and come up with more money-spinning services. There's another potential benefit: by integrating its messaging apps more tightly, Facebook can argue it would be harder to spin one or more of them off, as some antitrust campaigners think it should be forced to do.
These are content providers, not service providers. This isn't the railroad...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You're using these FB products and you're worried about PRIVACY, like, at all!?!? Hahahahaha, morons. The fuck out of here with this, anyone who gives a fuck wouldn't touch FB with anything but a subpoena.
They can also tap into users that don't use all of those platforms. e.g. I used WA for a few years before FB bought them. I abandoned Instagram several years ago, and have never used FB. BUT - now they will be able to more accurately track me, because they will have access to my WA data in FB. I am sure this will be done in a straight-forward way with an amended TOS that I may or may not ever see.
Yes, I can see the efficiencies of combining the back-ends from an operational perspective, but that is only a very small piece of the pie. Being able to more completely track people's information and triangulate on them is much more valuable.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
if you used any of these. I think I still have a BookFace account. I log into it once in a while to check to make sure my friends aren't dead. Inst and WA? Never signed up for either. F BookFace and it's analytics.
What users want this again? And why do I want to be msg'd by some facebook fag when I'm on whatsapp? I don't. I'm on whatsapp for THAT, and only that, functionality. I deleted my facebook account 5 years ago.
Somebody believes they aren't doing this with everything already?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's going from 150 dB to 153 dB. But it was already pretty loud to begin with...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
We should be asking that
1. All the central messenger servers be placed under the rotating (5 year?) control of a non-profit organization such as Mozilla, Apache, or Wikipedia.
2. All protocols utilize end-to-end encryption.
3. Protocol must be published as an open standard.
Users can be free to use any (well behaved) third-party client to connect to those services. The producers of those clients will be strongly encouraged (not to mention incentivized to donate to the organization that is running the central server).
I only use WhatsApp because it's not integrated with Facebook. I shut my FB account years ago. Time to look for a WhatsApp replacement..
The advertisers are the paying customers. What you want doesn't matter.
If a particular surveillance product stops producing quality data (for a low cost of acquisition), it will get merged or even shit-canned.
It is toxic and getting more so. Also, you really do NOT need it.
Folks, I quit WhatsApp for Telegram when all this was announced. I haven't looked back. Please join me.
I agree. That's the first thing I thought upon seeing the headline. "Who thinks they haven't been doing this since they day they bought these companies"? And, "How can I find these people, because I have a bridge to sell them."
I don't respond to AC's.
Since they already own them all, it doesn't really change anything.
Is their plan.
Steal information.
Eliminate privacy
Make Zuckerberg rich!
Corporatism != Free Market
Some are using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp for different groups of people. Like Facebook are for talking to your grandparents and don't mix them. :)
L'Idiot
they're already all facebook things, so the data is already being collected and 'shared' with itself.
Why anyone still uses Facebook services and expects any sense of privacy is beyond me...
If I invite a passerby into my house every day, and freely give them all of by valuables every day, sometimes every hour - who is to say that person has stolen anything?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
More like a software application running on a phone that the user chooses to use instead of a hundred different alternatives. Perhaps their choice boiled down to 'follow the herd', but there were a hundred other choices they and any fractional subset of the herd could have chosen. Or even simultaneously choose. Now, if it could be proven that facebook conspired to get ISPs to prohibit the poor class from operating servers of their own, then I'll give you antitrust.
I think this is super awesome news. Creepy Facebook is going to shut down all the actually-popular services they bought, and try to force the userbase onto some shitty, hacked together new platform that no one actually wants. They're going to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs!
One good thing about Creepy Facebook and Big Brother Google turning openly/brazenly evil: at the same time they are also turning bureaucratic and stupid. Faceboot in particular may yet destroy it's own business before Uncle Sam gets around to banning their data rape-based business model.
You don't need any of these services. If you choose to use them anyway then you don't care about your privacy. If you care about your privacy then you know what you must do.
https://telegram.org/ has a huge advantage over WhatssApp: your phone number is not shared with all members of a group (I avoid to participate in WhatsApp groups just for this)
Check out Matrix, it does the same as Telegram but is FOSS and distributed also on server side. Telegram is closed and owned by a Russian company. Matrix also supports bridging TG channels to Matrix side quite easily so existing communities can be merged. Telegram is not as evil as WhatsApp or others, but Matrix goes all the way. I closed my telegram clients a couple months ago and haven't looked back since.
"The good news is that the apps will all be required to use end-to-end encryption. ... By making it easier to swap messages, Facebook can mine even more data to target ads"
how can it be end-to-end encrypted while allowing mining of data for targetted ads?
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Whoever you add on Whatsapp will almost immediately show up on your Facebook friend suggestions, it would be extremely stupid of them to spend billions buying Whatsapp and not mine that data. Pretty sure everything you say on Whatsapp is already tracked by Facebook
Notics how the liberal biased Slashdot.org controllers move your score down to -1? That is exactly the kind of anti-conservative agenda that makes so many people so proud to support our amazing president who is doing all he can, working all day every day, to fight liberal bias in social media and in the fake news industry that support it.
It will just kill these apps as independent valuable products.
People use them for different social groups - for example many use whatsapp for dating correspondence but would never use facebook for that until way along in the relationship. (as fb tends to be reserved for family and friends).
Basically for the brain dead MBAs out there... you used to have 2 products worth $1 each ($2 total) combine them and you have one product worth $1.25 see how you just lost 75 cents.....
Facebook should learn from the food industry. If every single product Kraft, Unilever, or Nestle owned had their name in bold letters with what the name of the product was underneath it would sound alarm bells. FB's brand obviously is one of mistrust now so by folding them into each other is pure folly.
The EU clearly said WA and FB could not be merged. Interesting what will happen.
Folks, I quit WhatsApp for Telegram when all this was announced. I haven't looked back.
But did your friends and contacts do the same?
I'm aware of the shadow profile concept. I simply meant that this would "round out" their tracking so they can get more meat on those they can't directly track.
I would bet what they know about me isn't very complete. Many of my friends don't use FB, and if they do it doesn't have anything to do with me. I don't go out to eat very often, my friends don't take pics of me and put them online - and if they did, I don't have an account for them to tag.
It does concern me how willing everyone else seems to be about sharing the inane details of their lives online, including the details about everyone around them.
I can't stop it and I know it happens, but I do what I can to avoid just offering up my private information to companies that have no right to have that information.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.