Facebook plans to integrate the technical infrastructure for WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger. According to a New York Times report, Mr. Zuckerberg wants to increase the utility of the social network, keeping its billions of users highly engaged inside its ecosystem.
However, this would require thousands of Facebook employees to reconfigure how WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger function at their most basic levels.
The plan to integrate these apps is a change in Zuckerberg’s original stance toward WhatsApp and Instagram, when he acquired them. He had said he would give WhatsApp and Instagram plenty of autonomy from its parent company
It would seem that this change is precipitated by the tremendous growth of WhatsApp and Instagram. Sources say that the chief executive now believes tighter integration will benefit Facebook’s entire “family of apps” over the long term by making them more useful. Mr. Zuckerberg had floated the integration idea for months and began promoting it more heavily to employees toward the end of last year, the people said.
When integrated together, this would create a massive ecosystem that would provide huge opportunities for Facebook. However it would present a huge technical challenge.
Firstly, WhatsApp does not store messages and keeps minimal data and is the only one that currently uses end-to-end encryption by default.
Secondly, as noted in the New York Times report, the changes may also raise questions of data privacy because of how user information may be shared between the services. Currently, WhatsApp requires people to register only a phone number to sign up for the service but Facebook and Facebook Messenger ask users to provide their real identities. Matching Facebook and Instagram users to their WhatsApp handles could give pause to those who prefer keeping their use of each app compartmentalized.
“As you would expect, there is a lot of discussion and debate as we begin the long process of figuring out all the details of how this will work,” Facebook said in a statement.
