Facebook is testing Instagrams’ new messaging app, Threads with Automated Data Sharing
Facebook’s team is working on a companion app for Instagram, called “Threads“, which will automatically share your location, battery, a movement to a close group of friends.
It is much like a messenger application and the company plans to rival snapchat, an app that also caters to close friends and sharing updates. Though Snapchat has been standing as a good alternative for Facebook and Instagram with much more engagement with young people, Threads could be a game-changer.
The Instagram team was itself working on Direct, a messaging app since 2017 but they closed the project in May. But after the acquisition by Facebook, the team was transferred to the Facebook Messenger team and Threads could be the prized outcome.
The Verge reported, “Threads will regularly update your status, giving your friends a real-time view of information about your location, speed, and more. At the moment, Threads does not display your real-time location — instead, it might say something like a friend is ‘on the move’.”
Though the core of the messaging app will be that “messaging”, where friends can text, and even see status updates made on Instagram and can manually update the status on Threads but it does not dispute the privacy concerns over the automated data sharing.
Concerns over privacy and data
Facebook is testing Automated data sharing on Instagrams’ companion app Threads and if successful we could see it applied to other Facebook apps too. Privacy, of course, is a big concern with automatic updates and does need to be concerned over but what’s more interesting is how Facebook could use this data. After Mark Zuckerberg’s pivot over privacy and data, Facebook has become more private and a loss but with this new automated data sharing, users can become layman and habitual of sharing their updates.
“You change your behavior if you’re constantly being looked at,” said Siân Brooke, a researcher at Oxford Internet Institute “If you know people see where you are, what you’re consuming, you’ll change what you’re doing, change what is normal in a group.”
And thus the data mining cycle will resume where data could be tracked by the app and sold.
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