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It makes a lot of sense from the technical point of view.

Essentially, one could share a single table of "users" between Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Because the accounts can be easily identified and connected by email addresses and phone numbers, which don't change that often.

This way, a "Facebook Account" could become like a "Google Account", but for social media.

This is exactly how Google integrated YouTube.

It's bad for privacy, but good for everything else.




It would actually make product development a lot harder. You have three end-user apps developed by different teams, supporting different content, wrapped in different structures. Managing the differences when sending messages from one to another is probably going to result in very weird and inconsistent user experiences, especially in the shorter term.

Also, because of E2E encryption, the server infrastructure really cannot do the sort of content translation necessary to make things seamless.


I think the front-ends would remain completely separate, and the back-ends would be namespaced by a platform.

For instance: facebook.users, facebook.ads, facebook.feed, facebook.messenger, facebook.instagram, facebook.whatsapp.

This way, users and ads would be shared across all Facebook's platforms, which is, I believe, the main reason for the entire integration.


> It's bad for privacy, but good for everything else.

I'd argue that then, as we are talking of platforms on which you share most of your personal and private digital life, it is nothing but bad.


Facebook already has all the data it needs. What this change would do, is make an average person more aware of this.

It would also help to increase the protection of the single "Facebook Account" to those, who will decide that they still want to have it.

There were many questions such as "Did you quit Facebook in 2018?" in the media. Yet, the question should have really been "Did you quit Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in 2018?".

This update would make it much easier to do.


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