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Communications Encryption Facebook Social Networks

Zuckerberg Plans To Integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger (nytimes.com) 126

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, plans to integrate the social network's messaging services -- WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger -- asserting his control over the company's sprawling divisions at a time when its business has been battered by scandals.

The New York Times: The move, described by four people involved in the effort, requires thousands of Facebook employees to reconfigure how WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger function at their most basic levels. While all three services will continue operating as stand-alone apps, their underlying messaging infrastructure will be unified, the people said. Facebook is still in the early stages of the work and plans to complete it by the end of this year or in early 2020, they said.

Mr. Zuckerberg has also ordered all of the apps to incorporate end-to-end encryption, the people said, a significant step that protects messages from being viewed by anyone except the participants in the conversation. After the changes take effect, a Facebook user could send an encrypted message to someone who has only a WhatsApp account, for example. Currently, that isn't possible because the apps are separate.

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Zuckerberg Plans To Integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    From google killing off ad blockers, to zuck killing off some of the biggest applications in the world. I guess Gates was right when he said “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Gates said that? Wow, I thought he never said anything smart. Turns out he did.

      • Gates is phenomenally smart, and I've never even heard of him saying anything dumb (although I'm sure he has, and he admits he has). He's been a bad salesman at times and done selfish things. But dumb?

        BTW, that 640K line isn't well sourced and has been denied.

  • No point in keeping them separate. Would be a good thing if the resulting protocol stop being reliant on a mobile phone number and a mobile phone to operate.

    • It seems like very significant effort will be needed to integrate the services, so the question to me is why undertake that effort. Increased and integrated data collection on users seems very likely to be part of the reason. The comment above that indicates "That is probably "good enough" for facebook's social graph and combined with other data harvesting efforts ad targeting" is spot on I think.

      They are not doing all this work for no reason. But I would be interested to read what others reasons might be
      • Even without data collection (which they can already perform separately), there is a good reason. By having 2 (or 3, I didn't know instragram was a messaging platform) different services, they leave the door open to the competition.
        By merging Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp networks, they get the largest user base by a wide margin and could therefore "win" the messaging war.

    • by DogDude ( 805747 )
      They have a harder time tracking everything you do (and everywhere you go and everything you say) without a cell phone number. They're not ever going to drop that requirement.
  • I kind of liked whatsapp, even though it has got me into trouble numerous times. I like the idea of being able to communicate with my friends and family without having to have a "profile". And I like not having a wall where people post pictures and articles that I'm not interested in.
  • by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Friday January 25, 2019 @10:11AM (#58020482) Journal

    After the changes take effect, a Facebook user could send an encrypted message to someone who has only a WhatsApp account, for example. Currently, that isn't possible because the apps are separate

    Already my WhatsApp is being swamped with spam and forwards. There is no threading mechanism, no clear idea of what message is responding to whom. There is no way scroll past things I am not interested in. Pretty soon signal to noise degrades so much users resort to wholesale "delete all unread messages". I hate that damned thing.

    But so many of the groups I am interested in insist on using WhatsApp. Easy, convenient, at hand. A typical alumni group of about 100 people have 10 people responsible for 90% of the postings. 10 more read those posts. The rest delete all messages blindly.

    Now you allow Facebook users to spam the WhatsApp account. The already poor signal/noise ratio will degrade even further. I am hoping this finally kill WhatsApp for good and something better might emerge to take its place. Need the convenience and easy access, but some sort of threadable interface, some sort of AI learning who reads messages from whom and automatically group messages as "likely to be read" "likely to be skipped" ...

    • All for WhatsApp dying, but what is going to replace it? There is a real need for a modern cross-platform messaging system.

      • by mccalli ( 323026 )
        RCS [9to5mac.com] is meant to be the thing. Be interested to see its progress.
        • RCS is always going to suck as its a SMS/MMS replacement. It's based on phone number. No way to send a RCS from a Internet-connected PC or WiFi-only tablet without piggy-backing on your phone.
          It's also going to suck because carriers are going to own it, and will be able to bill by the message just like they sometimes do with SMS.

      • An all-platform messaging system already exists. It's called e-mail, and thankfully it's not owned by a single corporation.
        I don't see the need for a bazillion services that do nothing but duplicate the functionality of email, badly.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Voyager529 ( 1363959 )

          An all-platform messaging system already exists. It's called e-mail, and thankfully it's not owned by a single corporation.
          I don't see the need for a bazillion services that do nothing but duplicate the functionality of email, badly.

          E-mail has its advantages, but it has its drawbacks. It does threaded messaging terribly. It does many-to-many terribly. It is too easy for conversations to get fragmented and splintered, and incredibly difficult to rejoin them thereafter. Attachment limits are never clear. Spam is everpresent. There is no meaningful sent/delivered/read notification.

          There is a reason why Slack and Teams exist, and are popular in corporate environments where E-mail has long-since been a standard. I agree that a common, open

        • good luck explaining how to use e-mail to our grandma...
        • You missed the word modern; what is important is that it allow for different modes of communication-- text, voice, video, sending attachments. I prefer e-mail for almost everything except when *I* want text messages, but the opportunity to seamlessly transition to a phone or video call is pretty big.

          The frameworks are there for a distributed system, there just aren't applications really supporting it.

    • by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Friday January 25, 2019 @10:41AM (#58020644) Homepage Journal

      It almost like these things are being designed by people who've never seen usenet.

      • It almost like these things are being designed by people who've never seen usenet.

        usenet doesn't do any of the things they want to do, like track eyeballs. If they wanted usenet, they'd have used usenet.

        With that said, usenet + email + some kind of web of trust system would provide all the actually useful functionality of facebook, using 1980s technology...

    • by fallen1 ( 230220 )

      What about the severe child porn problem that is apparently plaguing WhatsApp (https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/whatsapp-pornography/ [techcrunch.com])? All this move to make communications end-to-end encrypted across all three platforms will do is extend the amount of people that can be reached, and can reach, those resources nearly anonymously -- making it more difficult to investigate the situation.

      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        We need to ban POTS lines and fax machines IMMEDIATELY!

        Also math and email.

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      Perhaps you should kick a few people out of the group chats?

  • by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Friday January 25, 2019 @10:14AM (#58020500)

    There have been calls to break up Facebook and other tech giants on antitrust ground. if Instagram and whatsapp are tightly integrated with FB to the point that it's one app this would make separating the functionality much harder.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    They're doing this to make it harder for the gov't to break up Facebook under anti-trust regs.

  • Instagram has been using the Facebook CDN to deliver images for at least a year already. And making friend suggestions for Instagram based on your FB friends list ...

    Failing to understand why this is even "news".
  • I don't use anything Facebook for obvious reasons, hence my question: What's the point of these various messaging services? Since all of the Facebook and Google ones seem to require a cell phone number now, why not just use the cell phone to communicate? Why run everything through Facebook?
  • I hope it's like Ryan's WUPHF app. :-)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Sounds like someone at Facebook took a look at WeChat / Weixin - it's basically that. Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram combined, in addition with games, payment systems, booking systems and whatnot. Not privacy friendly, but I guess that's what Zuck secretly wants.

  • So how many out there really believe we still have end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp? How many believe we will still have it after Zuck gets done integrating everything? I predict lots of backdoors! Never mind what Zuck says--his past actions have layed down the pattern. Maybe time to migrate to Telegram.
  • I use Wire [wire.com] and so do at least three people I know. Join us!

  • What would it take make a universal "messenger" standard that would allow people to use the app of their choice to communicate with other users who also use the app of their choice? Like we already have with telephone and email.

A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom. -- Parkinson

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