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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.
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.
Somebody believes they aren't doing this with everything already?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Definitely not a railroad, closer to a phone company...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System/
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).
It is toxic and getting more so. Also, you really do NOT need it.
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
Some people already named Signal. For the rest, do you know how to click a link?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
There problem isn't finding a replacement for WhatsApp, convincing your contacts to migrate with you is the difficulty.
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.
End to end enceyption just means they cant view your messages in transit. They own the app. That means they can still view the message at either end point, plus display whatever ads they want in the chat window. I have no evidence that they DO spy on us at the endpoints, but they certainly CAN.
That's why the protocol isn't open. If I could write my own app to use the WhatsApp protocol they would lose all ability to spy on me or advertise to me. Even if they're not doing it now, they definitely want to have the option in the future.