Facebook to merge Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger: What's actually happening and should I be worried?

There are some important clues about what the future might hold for three of the biggest apps in the world

Facebook is going to merge WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.

The shock announcement signals a major change for Facebook, one that could fundamentally alter how its products work.

The strategy is still in its early stages and there are still questions waiting to be answered, but it is clear that something very profound is about to change about how Facebook's many messaging apps work.

What's happening?

The three apps – which together are used by billions of people, and make up most of Facebook's most popular products – are going to change how their work in the most fundamental ways. There will still be three apps, but all of them will work together and each will changed to be integrated.

It will mean, in short, that the underlying infrastructure that powers the three apps will be brought together. Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram's messaging tools will just be three different ways into the same conversations.

It means in practise that, for instance, someone who only uses WhatsApp will be able to send an encrypted message to another person who only uses Facebook. That hasn't ever been possible before.

What's the situation now?

At the moment, the three are entirely separate. Though they are all developed by the same company, and so share some data between themselves and work together, they are in practise three different apps that can't talk to each other.

But this state of affairs has been gradually changing, even before this news. WhatsApp years ago started sharing data with Facebook, and the founders of both WhatsApp and Instagram have left the company in recent months amid suggestions they were concerned about their apps being subsumed into the parent company.

Why is it changing?

Mark Zuckerberg hopes the decision will make each of the apps more useful, according to the original New York Times report. That in turn should make people engage with them more – and potentially encourage them to stop using rivals, like Apple's iMessage.

“We want to build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private," a Facebook spokesperon said. "We're working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks. As you would expect, there is a lot of discussion and debate as we begin the long process of figuring out all the details of how this will work.”

In short, Facebook believes the combined infrastructure will make the apps better, and therefore more likely to be used; that, in turn, will help generate more of the data and advertising opportunities that Facebook relies on to make its money. But there might be other less obvious reasons to bring the three together, as well.

Why should I be worried?

Until now, the apps have been kept separate, and so the data they each collect has been partly compartmentalised too.

People have also been able to share different data with the companies themselves. WhatsApp only requires a phone number for people to use it, allowing them to stay relatively anonymous if they wish; on Facebook, people have to use their real name and are asked to give over far more personal information.

Many people choose to share more on WhatsApp or even entirely forego Facebook, because the latter has always had a more lax approach to people's personal data. WhatsApp has repeatedly stressed how important it is safeguard people's privacy – but that was largely led by its founders, who have left the company, and is thought to be getting eroded as it is subsumed by Facebook.

In short, the move could be a concern for anyone who prefers to keep their data separate – and away from Facebook. The sense of having some contacts, information or messages safe on WhatsApp and away from its owner, or vice versa, will be lost.

It's possible that same data will be used for advertising, and there have already been rumours about WhatsApp using information for marketing or showing ads within the app itself. No final decision on how the integrated services will be monetised has been decided yet, the New York Times reported.

Regulators are likely to share those concerns, and it's almost certain there will be yet more questions about whether Facebook should be more restrained than it is now.

When is it happening?

Facebook is still in the "early stages" of the work, according to the reports. But the plan is set to be finished by the end of this year or the beginning of 2020.

As with most Facebook projects, the rollout will probably be small at the beginning and gradually take place across users. It's likely that such a major update will be made available to a small number of beta testers initially before being added in stages.