The integration of Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram
Last month, I read a news article (that I found through Twitter of course) regarding the integration of Facebook’s Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram that allows users to send messages between the networks for the first time. The most interesting part of the merger was that the integration would involve enabling end-to-end encryption (E2E) across all three apps. This news had several perspectives to it ranging from what is means for Facebook as a company to take a major step towards ensuring user privacy, what it means for Mark Zuckerberg’s involvement with Whatsapp and Instagram that were previously independent (acquired) companies, how it influences Facebook’s business model and how is impacts the large user base inside this ecosystem. For this experience log, I am presenting a reflection on the last question i.e. how the E2E of the messaging platforms influences Facebook’s user base typing back to class readings on Encryption.
Thinking about this merger from a user base perspective, I think this is an extremely smart move by Facebook given findings from previous research (De Luca et al. from class) that suggest that peer influence primarily drives people to use a particular mobile IM, even for secure/private IMs. The merger can be viewed to be augmenting peer influence — for example a user can now message their friend on Instagram, even though they previously disliked the Instagram direct messaging functionality. From anecdotal evidence, I would believe that combining one’s social network across the three platforms sums up a majority portion of users one might want to contact via messaging. And, the E2E of the new unified messaging app maximizes the privacy and security affordances to a large number of people. From a design perspective, it will be interesting to see how this new platform unifies the UI/UX similarities and differences between WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. Will the underlying framework look like Messenger with features borrowed from Whatsapp and Instagram? Or, will it have a completely new interface and user experience? Also, I believe that the three apps do a good job with regards to usability individually. Therefore, integrating E2E within the platform will possibly resolve some of the usability challenges with current private/secure E2E apps. This relates to discussions in class where we questioned whether it is easier to make secure apps more usable or to make usable apps more secure. Majority opinion from class leaned towards the latter and I believe this merger will stand as a good case study for how usable apps can be made more secure.
On the flip side, there are arguments that the merger would lead to metadata across the three platforms intermingling that could cause privacy threats to say users of Whatsapp who did not have to share any personal information with Facebook at all. This leads to interesting questions around metadata privacy, the opportunities to ad-based business models and the risks that is presents to users. From a business perspective, since going E2E makes the company lose data that could possibly be analyzed for ad segments and other marketing opportunities, there has to be other business prospects for this merger. And the metadata collection across the ginormous user base combining the three platforms might just be the one providing the gains to balance out the data lost due to encryption.
