[CivilianZero]

I'm going to start this comment by saying that I don't agree with or approve of most of/anything Facebook has been doing. Security and Privacy are very important to me when it comes to the internet. I don't have a Facebook account.

So now I'd like to point out that the article has a couple mistakes. You don't actually need to provide anything but a phone number to use Facebook Messenger, but not many people know this, it seems. Related to this is a lot of hand-wringing about "oh no this will mean Facebook is watching us in all these apps now". Well, I'll address this in a second. I want to talk about this quote in the article:

"Matching Facebook and Instagram users to their WhatsApp handles could give pause to those who prefer keeping their use of each app compartmentalized."

This is already impossible. WhatsApp and Instagram collect information on you whether you have a Facebook account and whether or not you are logged in if you do have one. They know who are you are (this is the reason why I don't really care how encrypted WhatsApp is, I'm not going to use it). So if this really bothers people, well, I've got some bad news.