Late last year Facebook decided to show off by putting the “From Facebook” tagline on its products which include WhatsApp. WhatsApp users who didn’t know that WhatsApp was owned by Facebook’s were surprised when they started to that tagline on the messaging app.
Actually, some people on Twitter tweeted that they will stop using WhatsApp as a result of this realisation since they don’t trust Facebook with their data. However, their tweets seem to have failed to ingnite a mass exodus from WhatsApp as the messaging app went on to register it’s 2 billionth user in February this year.
What is ” From Facebook”?
The “From Facebook” tagline is nothing more than Facebook just letting the world know that WhatsApp is their baby. The tagline was slapped on WhatsApp as part of Facebook’s corporate rebranding on all of its platforms. On WhatsApp, the tagline appears at the bottom when you open or when you are exiting the app.
If you have been living under a rock, Facebook bought WhatsApp for a handsome sum of $19 billion back in 2014. Since that purchase, Facebook had steered clear of associating it’s name with WhatsApp up until the rebranding exercise which also extended to Instagram.
Announcing the rebranding exercise and the introduction of the “From Facebook” tagline, the Menlo Park based company said:
Facebook started as a single app. Now, 15 years later, we offer a suite of products that help people connect to their friends and family, find communities and grow businesses.
These apps and technologies have shared infrastructure for years and the teams behind them frequently work together.
The introduction of the tagline can be interpreted as a second step towards Facebook’s plan to integrate WhatsApp, the Facebook app and Instagram. The integration will reportedly see users information being shared on the three platforms, something which is being opposed by privacy advocates and lawmakers. The first step towards integrating its apps came in September last year when a feature that allows WhatsApp users to post their Status updates to Facebook was launched.
Some analysts think that showing the “From Facebook” tagline is actually the first step towards putting ads on the messaging app. Showing ads on WhatsApp is still a moot point and the number one suspected reasons why both co-founders of the app eventually quit the board of Facebook.
Does the introduction of “From Facebook” mean that WhatsApp is no longer encrypted?
Despite the arrival of the “From Facebook” tagline, WhatsApp still retains all of its features Above all, WhatsApp still protects users messages from snoopers with the vaunted end-to-end encryption.
Whatever the introduction of the “From Facebook” means, user’s prayers are that there won’t be radical changes that will be brought to WhatsApp.
