it is Impossible today to be on Facebook and share from Messenger with a contact who uses WhatsApp. It is that will change, among other things, the integration of the technical infrastructure of the three platforms of the social network, decided upon by Mark Zuckerberg a few months ago, according to information revealed by the New York Times . “We are looking at ways to facilitate the communication with your friends and family through networks,” said Facebook in a daily basis. The project would for the moment at a very preliminary stage, but Mark Zuckerberg would like to see it completed no later than early 2020. There are still “a lot of discussion and debate” on how the system will work, has added Facebook.
By allowing its users to exchange messages between its various platforms, Facebook hopes to be able to keep them longer in her lap. By 2018, the number of users of Facebook has peaked in the United States, see declined in Europe and more young people turn away from it. In certain geographical areas such as India or South America, WhatsApp is much more popular than Facebook. Face it, Google claimed last October, 1.5 million users of its Gmail email account. And Apple claimed last year to equip 1.3 billion devices in the world, a good part of it is likely to trade on iMessage, its own platform for messaging.
Discomfort in the internal
Another advantage of closer integration to Facebook: provide more easily of advertising services effective. As popular as they are, applications Messenger and WhatsApp are struggling for the moment to be monetised. This is not the case of Instagram, the real growth engine of Facebook, through advertising products to be very effective.
This movement, wanted by Mark Zuckerberg, has created a certain unease in the house and caused several departures. In may of last year, Jan Koum, the second co-founder of WhatsApp slamming the door, a few months after the departure of Brian Acton . In September, those of Instagram they dovetail with each other. During the acquisition of these two services, Mark Zuckerberg had promised that Instagram and WhatsApp to keep a certain independence. The situation has changed.
The task is huge and the technical difficulties to overcome, many. Thousands of developers are going to have to reconfigure the way in which WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram, three platforms were created independently – work at the deepest level. If WhatsApp is already an e-mail is encrypted end-to-end, this is not the case of the other two applications. According to sources in the New York Times , Mark Zuckerberg would like to see encryption become the standard. The messages of the users would therefore be inaccessible to those who do not have a decryption key, the occurent the sender and recipient.
The integration also poses questions on the exchange of data and the conditions for the respect of the european regulation on data protection (RGPD). In may 2017, Europe had sanctioned Facebook a fine of 110 million euros for having changed its privacy policy to associate the phone numbers of users of WhatsApp to user profiles of Facebook, as she had promised during the takeover that she would not be able to establish reliably the mapping to be automated between the accounts of users of Facebook and WhatsApp.
