The Pitfalls of Facebook Merging Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp Chats
WiredIn an effort led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has plans to rearchitect WhatsApp, Instagram direct messages, and Facebook Messenger so that messages can travel across any of the platforms. As things stand now, WhatsApp chats are end-to-end encrypted by default, while Facebook Messenger only offers the feature if you turn on "Secret Conversations." In attempting to unify its chat services, Facebook will need to find a way to help users easily understand and control end-to-end encryption as the ecosystem becomes more porous. WhatsApp users, for example, can assume that all of their chats are end-to-end encrypted, but what will happen in Facebook's newly homogenized platform if an Instagram user messages a WhatsApp user? The company has had a notoriously hard time earning revenue off of WhatsApp's 1.5 billion users, in part because of end-to-end encryption.