Facebook plans to partially combine its most popular messaging apps and some lawmakers don’t sound happy about it.
On Friday, The New York Times broke the news that CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pushing his company to merge the back-end of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. The change would mean that users of one app would be able to message users of another, and it would tie the currently disparate Facebook-owned products far more closely together.
The change comes as Facebook attempts to move on from months of bruising scandals and intense scrutiny over its handling of users’ data, from Cambridge Analytica’s misappropriation of more than 80 million users’ info to Facebook’s role spreading hate speech that fueled genocide in Myanmar.
The criticisms are indicative of the immense skepticism Facebook now faces from many lawmakers and members of the general public, and the uphill struggle it will face to convince people that any changes it makes going forward have its users’ best interests at heart.
That said, not everyone is as pessimistic about the potential consequences of the move. Alex Stamos, the outspoken former head of Facebook’s security, hailed it as having the potential to be “the most impactful uplift of communications privacy in human history,” if Facebook does implement end-to-end encryption.
“If Facebook is doing this so it can harvest even more our personal information for profit, it’s yet another reason to be concerned about how corporations are using our data. This is yet another reason to pass a strong privacy bill, like the one I’ve proposed.”
These comments from Capitol Hill may be more bark than bite for now. But with a growing call for tech regulation, and with several state attorney generals currently looking into practices of social media companies, Facebook can ill afford to give lawmakers another reason to scrutinize the company.