Last Friday, Facebook announced its plans to unify Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger, to make it easier for people to send messages across the platforms, while also ensuring that users stick to products from the tech company. These plans are however drawing scrutiny from the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), asking Facebook for an urgent briefing of what is being proposed.
In order to ensure strict compliance to the GDPR policy, Irish DPC will be closely scrutinizing the plans, as they solely depend on sharing and merging of personal user data between the different platforms.
The data protection company said in a statement that integration can only occur in the EU if all requirements of the GDPR are met.
See Also: Facebook Is Working on Cryptocurrency for WhatsApp Transfers
There was an earlier attempt by Facebook in 2016 to share personal data gathered by Whatsapp with the larger business, but was terminated after an investigation by the UK’s data protection watchdog.
Officials have raised concerns that Facebook would be better if it had to compete with Instagram and Whatsapp. “It would have encouraged real competition that would have promoted privacy and benefited consumers”, said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a Silicon Valley lawmaker.
Also, of the three instant messaging apps, Whatsapp is the only platfrom which offers end-to-end encryption, and is believed that there is a huge probability that Whatsapp would lose that key advantage, while users may not lose out on the secure features the platform possesses.
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