But it could also unlock an even richer and more nuanced user data trove for Facebook to mine, and potentially make it harder to use one or more of the services without tying those profiles to a central identity.

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Thursday evening, Zuckerberg wrote that, 'There’s no question that we collect some information for ads-but that information is generally important for security and operating our services as well.' An indelible identity across Facebook's brands could have security benefits like enabling stronger anti-fraud protections. 'If the goal is to allow cross-app traffic, and it’s not required to be encrypted, then what happens?' In attempting to unify its chat services, Facebook will need to find a way to help users easily understand and control end-to-end encryption as the ecosystem becomes more porous. In practice, it can be difficult to use the protection effectively if it's enabled for some chats and not for others and can turn on and off within a chat at different times. End-to-end encrypted chat protocols ensure that data is only decrypted and intelligible on the devices of the sender and recipient. But cryptographers and privacy advocates have already raised a number of obvious hurdles the company faces in doing so. WhatsApp's move to add default encryption for all users was a watershed moment in 2016, bringing the protection to a billion people by flipping one switch.įacebook is still in the early planning stages of homogenizing its messaging platforms, a move that could increase the ease and number of secured chats online by a staggering order of magnitude. The New York Times first reported the move Friday, noting also that Zuckerberg wants the initiative to 'incorporate end-to-end encryption.' Melding those infrastructures would be a massive task regardless, but designing the scheme to universally preserve end-to-end encryption-in a way that users understand-poses a whole additional set of critical challenges.Īs things stand now, WhatsApp chats are end-to-end encrypted by default, while Facebook Messenger only offers the feature if you turn on 'Secret Conversations.' Instagram does not currently offer any form of end-to-end encryption for its chats. In an effort led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has plans to rearchitect WhatsApp, Instagram direct messages, and Facebook Messenger so that messages can travel across any of the platforms.

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