Today, Facebook has introduced the world to Facebook Pay, a new payment system which will be integrated with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. The social networking site, notably known as the originator of the famous Area 51 raid meme and subsequent party, has already employed payment methods in the past through its website and messenger service, allowing businesses to charge customers for services as well as offering person-to-person payments, but now these services will be rendered across all the company’s owned platforms.
It’s safe to say Facebook isn’t the most trustworthy company in the world, what with their insistence on the impossibility of blocking false statements in advertising on their service. Although the history of the company is well-known, thanks in part to films like The Social Network, Facebook in and of itself is still held at arms length by the majority of users, many of which are uncomfortable with the company’s recent policy decisions regarding privacy and transparency.
However, from streaming their own Facebook TV shows to creating augmented reality video games, Facebook continues to push into different realms of the technological marketplace, as evidenced by the recent unveiling of Facebook Pay. As announced in a press release on the Facebook Newsroom, Facebook Pay will be one unifying payment program which is integrated with Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. Users will be able to pick and choose which of the individual apps they would like to activate their Facebook Pay account with, and the program is said to support most major credit and debit cards as well as PayPal.
At launch, this service is only available in the United States, and even then only through Facebook and Messenger, but Facebook promises both WhatsApp and Instagram, as well as international versions, are coming soon. In their announcement for the program, Facebook promises to be “continuing to invest in security,” saying they have designed Facebook Pay to securely encrypt and store users bank and credit card information.
Hundreds of thousands of people already use Facebook as a way to both make and send money, as well as for Facebook AR games, so this foray into some sort of overarching payments service for all of the company’s platforms is not entirely surprising, but it is worrisome. Facebook has never had the tightest lid on their security, having been infamously hacked multiple times throughout it’s existence, and it will be interesting to see just how secure the Facebook Pay system is moving forward.
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Source: Facebook
