You are on Insta. Find something cool that you want to share with your friend. What you do? You switch to WhatsApp, text him/her and then come back to Insta again. And you end up doing this a hundred times. Well, no more as change is just round the corner!

If a recent report is to be believed, Facebook is planning to merge Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. After the merger, the users can message across all the services without switching the apps.

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp will continue to operate as stand-alone apps after the expected merger, but their underlying technical infrastructure will be unified, New York Times reported. In simple words, about more than 2.6 billion collective users of the three worlds will be able to communicate, across the platforms for the first time.

Following the changes, Facebook users would only be able to send encrypted messages to a WhatsApp account. Excited? Well, you have to wait for 2020 for the integration to be fully complete.

However, the reported integration plan does raise privacy questions regarding the users’ data and how it may be shared between services. Like, WhatsApp currently requires only a phone number when new users sign up. On the other hand, Facebook and Facebook Messenger ask users to provide their true identities.

So, if you are keeping your apps and identities separately, you just might find yourself in a soup very soon.

Integration of WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger will be no cake walk. WhatsApp is the only among these services to currently use end-to-end encryption by default. Also, it does not store messages and keeps minimal user data unlike Facebook Messenger and Instagram.

Well, for better or worse, a change is about to come. What we can do best is to wait and see how quickly we can get used to it.

The post Facebook Planning To Merge Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger: Are You Ready? appeared first on OurTitbits.