Our biggest time stealer in 2016 has been the ubiquitous WhatsApp Group Chat that continues to dominate the pop-up notification system on our smartphones. They have become the fastest way to share news, stories, photos, videos or silly jokes. Although managing the influx of messages can be annoying at times, however, being able to have family, friends and work colleagues in the same virtual room makes this tool invaluable.
It’s sort of like a 21st-century conference call.Receiving a flood of messages can cause undesirable interruption and become a nuisance when trying to concentrate on more pressing matters at hand, but this pales in significance compared to the problems it causes the establishment. The encryption that protects our modern method of mobile communication has for quite some time been a thorn in the side of authorities who are currently unable to monitor conversations without first removing the encryption that keeps us all safe in an ironic twist of fate.
However, Android developer Javier Santos
a feature in the latest beta build of WhatsApp that suggests that your WhatsApp conversations could soon be shared with Facebook. An optional (for now) feature labeled “Share My Account Info,” will share your personal WhatsApp account information with Facebook in order “to improve your Facebook experience.”At this moment in time, we do not know for sure what this sharing of information will entail, but I suspect that on the surface it will enable users to share photos to their Facebook timeline from their WhatsApp group conversations, create albums and vice versa thus providing a seamless user experience between the two platforms.
It will also give Facebook access to links, images, and videos that we are sharing on WhatsApp, which is classified as dark social and is incredibly valuable to businesses that are keen on tracking the 72% of our digital shares that are currently off the radar.
On a more positive note, the beta release also appears to have a new end-to-end encryption option, that promises to make our messages and media even more secure at a time when there is an increasing awareness of the so-called snooper charters by governments.
After admitting that the yearly subscription charge for the application was simply not working, it was swiftly removed to pave the way for a digital gateway that would use the WhatsApp platform to connect companies directly with users.
The issue of in-app advertising possibly becoming a turn-off for its users remains open. However, rather than offering advertising or direct communiqués from businesses, WhatsApp wants to offer services that allow banks to notify their customers about a particular transaction or provide airlines with a communications channel to inform a traveler about a delayed flight. Primarily, WhatsApp wants to guide organizations away from their prehistoric SMS alerts and towards the 21st century messaging platform of choice.
This further helps Facebook maintain it’s everything under one roof tenet where it can handle all of our communications, lifestyle choices, online sharing, likes, and dislikes within its virtual walled garden that will no doubt be put into a large data center somewhere in order to build a profile on consumers that can be sold to businesses for a kings ransom.
Many companies are struggling to make sense of the wealth of ‘Big Data’ that they have gathered over the past few years and translate it into something meaningful that will help them understand their customers. Although Facebook has fierce critics for its attitude towards privacy, every business across the world is attempting to do the same thing with their data that Facebook is doing with theirs, albeit often failing miserably.
As for users, the adage of ‘if you’re not paying for a product, then by default you are the product’ is increasingly becoming more relevant in this digital age. Although the scrapping of the $1 annual subscription fee may have seemed like a small consumer victory, however, many are now starting to realize the value of Facebook and its landmark $19 billion acquisition.
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