What does that mean? Well, Facebook would no longer need to worry about their messaging apps being used for harassment, abuse, or more heinous crimes like paedophilia. However, this also leads to some difficult conversations around moderation, as it essentially takes Facebook off the hook when it comes to policing the use of their apps. This is, in many ways, a win for users, who can feel more confident that their messages aren’t being read by Facebook, or any group that might be able to obtain them illegally from Facebook’s servers. Moving toward a policy of default end-to-end encryption is likely a calculated move by Facebook to recover from a lot of the damage done to their brand caused by the high-profile privacy scandals it’s suffered from over the last few years. While these messages are ‘in-transit’ and stored on Facebook’s servers, they are scrambled, so that even if they were accessed illegally, they would be illegible. Many will remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the titular political consulting firm used user data that should have been confidential to target ads for the 2016 US election.Įnd-to-end encryption is, in short, a way of making messages readable only to the people in the conversation, and no one else. Why is end-to-end encryption important to Facebook?įacebook has been under fire for years now regarding poor privacy policies and leaky data protection. Along with additions like these, the change is largely being billed as an added convenience for users, who no longer need to remember which app they are using for which conversation-all conversations will be accessible on any app.īut Facebook’s primary goals are certainly less focused on functionality, and they have maintained that their main reason for pushing the merger is in fact end-to-end encryption across all platforms. It will also add some minor functionality to each app, such as the addition of Instagram’s ‘Watch Together’ feature to Messenger. Why is Facebook implementing this merge?Īs early as January last year, Zuckerberg has been talking about the potential benefits of integrating the underlying infrastructure of these apps, saying “The first reason I’m excited is moving more to end to end encryption by default in our products”. It also means that users can speak to each other in the same conversation from different apps. This update will mix some of the different app’s features together, allowing new chat options from Messenger in Instagram, for example. The merge combines WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram’s chat feature into one back-end, while keeping each of the three apps distinctly separate to the user. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed plans to merge the private messaging features of the company’s three major apps for some time now, first speaking about it early last year.
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