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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.
No. Messaging is a service. They don't provide any content.
In an ideal world the messaging protocols would be open. Maybe that should be the focus of any antitrust case.
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.
There problem isn't finding a replacement for WhatsApp, convincing your contacts to migrate with you is the difficulty.