![]() ![]() ![]() Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, criticized the change on antitrust grounds. Marc Rotenberg, president and executive director the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said on Friday that the change would be “a terrible outcome for internet users.” He urged the Federal Trade Commission, America’s de facto privacy regulator, to “act now to protect privacy and to preserve competition.” Matching Facebook and Instagram users to their WhatsApp handles could give pause to those who prefer to keep their use of each app separate. By contrast, Facebook and Facebook Messenger ask users to provide their true identities. WhatsApp currently requires only a phone number when new users sign up. The integration plan raises privacy questions because of how users’ data may be shared between services. Zuckerberg over the integration plan on internal message boards and during a contentious staff meeting in December, according to four people who attended or were briefed on the event. More recently, dozens of WhatsApp employees clashed with Mr. WhatsApp’s founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, departed for similar reasons. Instagram’s founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, left the company abruptly last fall after Mr. The effort has caused strife within Facebook. Zuckerberg floated the idea for months and began to promote it to employees more heavily toward the end of 2018, the people said. He now believes integrating the services more tightly will benefit Facebook’s entire “family of apps” in the long term by making them more useful, the person said. Zuckerberg to change his thinking, one of the people said. WhatsApp and Instagram have grown tremendously since then, prompting Mr. (Facebook Messenger is a homegrown service spun off the main Facebook app in 2014.) Zuckerberg promised WhatsApp and Instagram plenty of autonomy from their new parent company. Zuckerberg’s previous stance toward WhatsApp and Instagram, which were independent companies that Facebook acquired. Knitting together Facebook’s apps is a stark reversal of Mr. Zuckerberg has repeatedly apologized for the problems and has vowed to fix them. Those and other issues have slowed Facebook’s growth and damaged its reputation, raising the hackles of lawmakers and regulators around the world. The change follows two years of scrutiny of Facebook’s core social network, which has been criticized for allowing election meddling and the spreading of disinformation. ![]() If users can interact more frequently with Facebook’s apps, the company might also be able to increase its advertising business or add new revenue-generating services, the people said. That could reduce people’s appetite for rival messaging services, like those offered by Apple and Google. ![]() Zuckerberg hopes to increase Facebook’s utility and keep users highly engaged inside the company’s ecosystem. In a statement, Facebook said it wanted to “build the best messaging experiences we can and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private.” It added: “We’re working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks.”īy stitching the apps’ infrastructure together, Mr. Zuckerberg has also ordered that the apps all incorporate end-to-end encryption, the people said, a major step that protects messages from being viewed by anyone except the participants in a conversation. The plan - which is in the early stages, with a goal of completion by the end of this year or early 2020 - requires thousands of Facebook employees to reconfigure how WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger function at their most basic levels, said the people involved in the effort, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter is confidential. Zuckerberg is imposing his authority over units he once vowed to leave alone. The move has the potential to redefine how billions of people use the apps to connect with one another while strengthening Facebook’s grip on users, raising antitrust, privacy and security questions. That will bring together three of the world’s largest messaging networks, which between them have more than 2.6 billion users, allowing people to communicate across the platforms for the first time. The services will continue to operate as stand-alone apps, but their underlying technical infrastructure will be unified, said four people involved in the effort. SAN FRANCISCO - 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 scandal. ![]()
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