Facebook to integrate WhatsApp Instagram and Messenger by 2020

The three services will, however, continue as standalone apps, the report said, citing four people involved in the effort, reports The Guardian. The company is still in the early stages of the work, and plans to complete it by the end of this year or in early 2020, the report said.

After the changes, a Facebook user, for instance, will be able to send an encrypted message to someone who has only a WhatsApp account, according to the report. End-to-end encryption protects messages from being viewed by anyone except the participants in the conversation.

The firm noted that uniting the back-end technology that runs Instagram, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp is more than just an engineering call, but that it will bring together users of all three apps in a single network, database and community — enabling new features and opening the door to even more anticompetitive challenges, privacy troubles and social conflicts.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg renewed his defence of the social network’s business, arguing that targeting ads based on interests was different from selling people’s data. “If we’re committed to serving everyone, then we need a service that is affordable to everyone,” Zuckerberg says in an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal.

“The best way to do that is to offer services for free, which ads enable us to do.”

2018 was a horrific year for Facebook, marked by a series of scandals over data protection and privacy and concerns that the leading social network had been manipulated by foreign interests for political purposes.

Despite the scandals, Facebook revenue and user numbers have continued to grow. Making ads relevant, and less annoying, involves understanding people’s interests, according to Zuckerberg.

Facebook uses “signals” such as pages users “like” and what they share about themselves to target advertising.

“Sometimes this means people assume we do things that we don’t do,” Zuckerberg says of the business of supporting the social network with targeted ads.

“For example, we don’t sell people’s data, even though it’s often reported that we do.” Selling user data would not only undermine essential trust in the social network, but it would also go against Facebook’s business interests because rivals could use it to compete for advertising, he reasons. (The Guardian)

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