In an unprecedented decision that left tech observers stunned, Facebook decided to create a common platform for its three core apps: Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Never in the history of the company have billions of dollars been spent on acquiring other companies that are then integrated into the same framework…
Companies usually continue to operate their subsidiaries as separate entities.
The order to integrate, of course, comes from above, from Zuckerberg himself, who, according to the New York Times, has given the developers a year to complete the project.
Here we should mention that we had no indication of the decision, except perhaps the departures of the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp from Facebook in recent months.
So the decision came as a shock to those who believed Facebook's promise that WhatsApp and Instagram would operate independently after their acquisition.
However, there will be several serious repercussions to the decision to integrate Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp with Facebook. The Greek Media presents the event as groundbreaking, which may be true, but no one examines what will really happen behind the scenes.
When the 3 services are unified into a single software platform, it is inevitable that Facebook will link users' accounts through their unique identifiers, removing to some extent the pseudo-anonymity that some Instagrammers or WhatsApp users believe they have.
While Facebook is already a huge data bank, merging the three apps will give the company greater access to users' data from their daily lives, which it will use to find new ways to earn more.
What will happen to the end-to-end encryption used by WhatsApp's platform when the three apps merge (Instagram is not a messaging service?)
The integration of the apps with Facebook will again spark discussions with the authorities, and we shouldn't be surprised if we find that the new code includes a backdoor for the FBI.
Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata analysis of 3 key platforms (Messenger, Whatsapp & Instagram). They will make money by tracking your relationships and social groups. They will make that information easily accessible to law enforcement.
— Sarah Jamie Lewis (@SarahJamieLewis) January 25, 2019
According to the NYT publication, there are some internal concerns (from company employees) about the project. Most of them are doubts about the benefit of connecting the three services, because it is not expected to bring in many new users.
This shows that Facebook employees don't really understand how the company earns the money it uses to pay their salaries.
Tip: A very good source of cash is to collect as much data as possible from users and sell it to advertisers.
Of course, unification may create more problems: the history of computing is littered with unfortunate attempts to force different products to work under the same platform.
But the benefits for Facebook are significant. One of them is that it will get rid of the many (and expensive) software engineers it currently needs to support three different products. Yes, we're talking about layoffs, and it will do so as soon as it gets the chance.
Only with the departure of the founders of the WhatsApp and Instagram applications, the company has gained a fortune through share re-allocations.
We should probably all understand (those who haven't) that Facebook is not a simple social network that helps us find our friends, but an unscrupulous, profit-making company that wants our data.
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