Facebook Inc has announced the launch of Facebook Pay, a payment service that unites payments across its social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger.
The social media giant made known that through Facebook Pay, users can make payments using their security options such as PIN or biometrics on their smartphones without exiting the app.
The payment option, which will be available on Facebook and Messenger this week in the United States before getting to other countries, also allows users to shop, make in-game purchases, buy event tickets, donate to causes, and send money to each other, amongst other things.
The Chief Executive Officer of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg had earlier announced the company’s plan to unify the messaging structure across its platforms. He said the conversations would be in such a way that users can navigate in and out of various messages on any of the apps – Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, as they will be synced together.
Hence, Facebook Pay kickstarts the planned merging of the underlying infrastructure behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to enable messaging between the three services.
According to Facebook in a blog post, for a transaction to be made, Facebook Pay will need to collect user information such as payment method, date, billing and contact details. The data collected will also be used to show targeted advertisements to users.
What you should know: Facebook has been in the spotlight for privacy breaches since early this year. However, the company does not seem to be backing down in using users’ privacy data; instead, it has yet again launched a new service, the Facebook Pay that allows users’ data to be used for advertisements.
Meanwhile, it is pertinent to note that Facebook Pay is built on existing financial infrastructure and partnerships and is separate from the Calibra wallet which will run on the Libra network. The payment feature supports most major credit and debit cards as well as PayPal.