Would you trust Facebook with your money?

Rumors about Facebook’s plans to launch some kind of monetary instrument for its Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp instant messaging tools with features similar to those of China’s WeChat or AliPay have been doing the rounds throughout 2018, and now, as the year comes to an end, Bloomberg has raised the possibility again.

This all dates back to the beginning of 2018 and a series of proposals put forward by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg among which was exploring cryptocurrencies within the context of the debate over centralization vs decentralization, one of the most exciting on the technological scene. Specifically, the paragraph that generated the interest was this:

“There are important counter-trends to this — like encryption and cryptocurrency — that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.”

Facebook has moved on a series of fronts since then. At the end of January, it banned advertisements related to cryptocurrencies, bitcoin or ICOs, arguing that most were scams, a decision that was reversed a few months later, in June, after implementing a monitoring process for these ads.

In May, a story in Cheddar added fuel to the flames of speculation: David Marcus, previously president of PayPal and then in charge of Facebook Messenger, was appointed to head Facebook’s Blockchain Research unit and was tasked with “exploring the best way to use blockchain on Facebook, starting from scratch.” The presence of Marcus, a member until August of the board of the largest cryptocurrency exchange site, Coinbase, once again unleashed speculation about what Facebook might have in hand: he might have abandoned the board of Coinbase to avoid potential conflicts of interest, suggesting that in the not-to-distant future, Facebook might be thinking of launching products ranging from P2P payment tools or micropayments, including the possibility of using Facebook Connect as a way for users to identify themselves when making cryptocurrency transactions.

Now, according to Bloomberg, the idea would be to provide WhatsApp with a tool that would allow, for example, users in India, one of the main markets of the instant messaging tool, to send money there, with the idea of ​​developing a stablecoin linked to a reference value to avoid volatility, and to reduce the costs involved in these types of remittance. After using India as a trial, the plan would be to extend those tools to the global market.

Sounds like a great idea. What’s the problem? The problem is whether anybody would trust a company like Facebook to take charge of their economic transactions. In fact, would anyone trust Facebook with anything? Could a company that has shown itself totally lacking in principles become the chosen tool for economic transactions? What would happen the moment after you did? Who would end up with our information and what would they do with it? Facebook has shown that it is willing to sell any useful information it can extract from its users, and when it doesn’t sell it, it gives it away or it gets stolen.

How would the market value the convenience of a payment tool linked to the omnipresent WhatsApp or the way the company would advertise it to encourage adoption? Would you use a Facebook tool to pay somebody something somewhere?

(En español, aquí)