SAN FRANCISCO:
Facebook said Friday it is trying to get its messaging apps to be friends,
allowing encrypted missives be exchanged no matter which of its services are
used. The leading social network is behind free, stand-alone smartphone apps
Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Each service is popular, but users have to
be in the same application to exchange to connect.

"We're
working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering
ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks," a
Facebook spokeswoman said in reply to an AFP inquiry regarding a New York Times
report about the effort. "As you would expect, there is a lot of
discussion and debate as we begin the long process of figuring out all the
details of how this will work."

Facebook hoped to
get the messaging apps communicating with one another, while remaining separate
services, by the end of this year or early next year, according to the Times report.
Each of the Facebook-owned messaging services boasts more than a billion users.
End-to-end encryption would mean messages exchanged between the services would
be scrambled to hide contents from snooping. - AFP