I read the entire article, but they don’t mention the details of how they’re going to make all your purchase history available to advertisers, and how they’re going to use this to track you around the internet even better to spam you with more ads of things you just bought. Maybe I just missed these details though…
... with a canned response saying "sorry, nothing we can do!"
From the FAQ:
> Is there Purchase Protection for online shopping?
> Purchases made through third-party sites, local pickups, Messenger transactions, or through other messaging services don't qualify for Purchase Protection. Learn more about how Purchase Protection works on Facebook.
> Safe to assume Facebook is going to milk this data for all it's worth.
I'm no Facebook fan, but let's be honest. Your bank, credit card company, and merchants are all doing exactly the same thing. Perhaps the bank is regulated tightly enough that it isn't quite as bad, but the others definitely are.
Every single store that asks if you want a digital receipt in lieu of paper, is doing this. Every single store that gives you coupons in exchange for your your email, is doing this.
To note, credit card companies are open about this in the contracts you sign, and it’s their core business model so there is no possible surprise element.
Yeah but Facebook is primarily an advertising company, and one of the biggest advertising companies at that. They can much better leverage this data and milk it to a much greater extent. People aren't going to your bank or credit card company in order to buy ads targetting you.
> In 1999, Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB).
...
> Under GLB, companies can sell their customers’ financial data to anyone they choose, including credit card information such as the date, amount, and recipient of charges, and the personal details consumers provide when they fill out applications. Consumers have no privacy under federal regulations unless they affirmatively take steps to “opt out” of this sharing, repeating the process for each and every financial service provider who may have data about them.
...
> Even this opt-out option is not available for consumers to stop credit card companies and issuing banks from sharing this data with their financial affiliates and financial “joint marketers,” a vaguely defined term that provides a giant loophole in privacy protections.
PS. Just to make sure - I'm not trying to defend Facebook here, or credit card companies.
You're not wrong. What's troubling is combining that with information gleaned from from the "social graph" as well as well as all the surveillance Facebook does via its web trackers. I'd rather this stuff be stored in different silos by different competitors than centralized in one place.
Although IIRC Facebook already buys some of this info from data brokers so...
My bank (eu) has ver strict privacy controls. Not least of which was me telling them I'll leave if anything spammy appears.
Cc company, same.
Merchants? To be fair, Ialways expect an avalanche of crap after signing something, but...nothing yet.
Eu rules in general, or I just got lucky?
Wait, so their solution to fraud is "send us an email and pray something happens"? Neat. If I could trust this thing less I would, but the word "Facebook" in the name already pegs it at zero, so... Hard pass.
And about storage, ok, read this:
Anti-fraud technology monitors purchases on our systems to detect unauthorized activity.
Your payment method is not shared with buyers, sellers, or merchants without your consent, and is stored separately from your account data.
And tell me it doesn't say all payment data is stored on FB servers and mined by all their algorithms.
Don't worry, some people who made their money from ads or ad-dependent business models will be along shortly to tell us how ads are actually a good thing, and targeted^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "relevant" ads are even better.
"""
Facebook will receive your Facebook Pay order information and may use the data as outlined in our Data Policy. This includes showing your transaction information in your Facebook Pay settings. The actions you take with Facebook Pay can be used for purposes such as to serve you more relevant content, provide customer support, and promote safety and integrity (example: to investigate violations of our policies). The payment card numbers you provide won’t be shared with anyone for marketing purposes, used to personalize your experience nor inform the ads you see without your consent. Learn more about what Facebook Pay does with your payment information.
It's also available in Iraq, a place where PayPal is yet to set foot, with the growing small business sector there, it'll be interesting to see how it unfolds.
I remember being able to buy PIA tickets from USA in 2014 using my credit card somehow - I think some Pakistani bank had contracted with Verified by VISA
The small print is scary, at least compared to a service like PayPal. There's absolutely no consumer protection unless you're actually buying something from Facebook themselves, and for any kind of returns or refunds the advice given is "contact your bank".
That's the same way that Venmo (or any of the other p2p payments) work (though I guess Venmo has a specific "opt in to some extra protection for a fee").
> To keep your information secure, your debit and credit card numbers are encrypted for safe and secure storage. This information won’t be shared with sellers.
> With Facebook Pay, you can create a PIN or use your device's face or fingerprint recognition to confirm payments. Learn how to set up a PIN for Facebook Pay.
> For transactions you make with Facebook Pay, you’ll receive payment confirmation details in an email. If you see a transaction you don’t recognize, please contact your bank or financial institution.
And
> Is there Purchase Protection for online shopping?
> Purchases made through third-party sites, local pickups, Messenger transactions, or through other messaging services don't qualify for Purchase Protection. Learn more about how Purchase Protection works on Facebook.
LOL. Reminds me when I got scammed paying for something with my card through Cash app. Even though they identified that I had got ripped off their support script had a bug that would not allow them to refund me, so they said it was easier just to terminate my account.
Payments are regulated by financial regulation in many countries, no matter the fine print.
For EU countries this would probably be governed by the PSD2 payment services directive and the GDPR data protection.
Specifically, payment transaction data may reveal personal data and using it for other purposes than the payment itself would require explicit consent.
IANAL. It would be interesting if lawyers with up to data knowledge on financial regulations in various jurisdictions could elaborate on this.
Because other companies that offer similar services offer this feature, and thats why people use it and trust it. Paypal is very buyer focused as opposed to seller focused. Eg. if you buy something on ebay and you don't get the product or its defective or its fraud, paypal reverses the tx and puts the onus on the seller to prove you wrong.
This doesn't matter so much when sending money to friends, but an expected use case people imagine for facebook based p2p tx is fb marketplace, where you can buy things from random people online. A lot of fraud and sketchy behavior already happens there (eg. buying stolen products). Not being able to have easy reversion of such tx is bad for buyers (and good for fraudulent sellers).
Not sure if you're in the USA, but for US users, banks are pretty hands off this sort of behavior and will only reverse TX in serious fraud issues, but require the loser to pass a high bar to prove its fraud. Normal bank to bank tx is a "pull" model, so middle men services typically offer protection for the buyer to stop a "pull" in the case of fraud. Thats why the US has created many p2p services that are "push" based (eg. venmo, cash app), and why credit cards companies offer protections like charge reversal and take on that risk (you agree that you'll return money in a charge-back as a condition of VISA/etc letting you use the network).
At least compared to PayPal?! PayPal refused to help with a fraudulent short term rental payment. Thank God that I paid through PayPal with a credit card and the credit card company helped. Horrible company.
When something wants to be involved in financial transactions and it can be described as "scary" compared to PayPal, you've engineered a problem. PayPal has a history of being customer hostile and withholding funds without notice. I don't plan to read the FB TOS because I have a hard block in place for them but that's a pretty damning statement.
I can’t think of another company I’d want less to know my transaction and purchase history than FB/Meta. What happened to Zuckerberg’s shift to “video” or are they truly throwing anything and everything at the wall now?
The terrible thing is is that it's the easiest solution for me and my friend group to send money via Messenger.
The US has _really_ dropped the ball on any sort of easy-to-use, standardized money transfer. Zelle is the closest thing and it is a joke for every day usability.
since we are talking consumers here, what would it look like to a regular user? would I have to walk around asking people for their account numbers and routing numbers to FedNow them the money?
It will eventually support aliases (like Zelle does) as well as cross border payments, but my understanding is that it won’t at launch (as the desire is to get the ACH delays gone first). I don’t have consumer UX insight, only into the ISO20022 message plumbing (user->institution->Fed->institution->user).
That's definitely a down side to it. I think you used to be able to choose your username, but now the only options my bank gives me are name + surname, first initial + surname or, oddly, middle name + surname
If it’s anything like Canada’s INTERAC e-transfers, you ask for the person’s email address; they receive an email bouncing them to a SAML sign-on portal with support for all major banks, which lets them use their bank to SSO into the payment system; and then the payment system uses the SSO-reflected banking details as the destination for depositing the money.
INTERAC now lets you set up auto deposit - simply go to your bank’s online banking portal and register your email and from then on any incoming transactions go to whatever account you chose. Very handy! No more “security questions”
They’re also rolling out support for phone numbers as identifiers in addition to email addresses but my bank doesn’t seem to support sending to phone numbers (or registering mine as auto deposit) yet.
In the UK (and I believe all of Europe), the system is indeed based on bank account numbers and sort codes, but popular banking apps like Monzo will do WhatsApp-style contact lists, where banking details of your phone contacts are synced and you can just pick them from the list (note: account number are not considered secret sensitive information). Banking apps will usually save someone’s details for future usage.
In India, we have UPI and other forms of instant transaction system (all of them are free in any decent bank, I believe).
With UPI, you can connect your bank account (no matter which bank it is) with any UPI based payment app and create IDs which can be shared for receiving or requesting payments. (These IDs are unique on basis of both app and bank).
So I can connect my bank account to gpay and create a new ID. Send them to others who are using gpay or any other UPI app (bank apps also have UPI functionality built in). They can send the payment to the ID (which will be automatically added to my bank). This is instant.
It can also be used for requesting payment by others and I can accept or decline the request.
Alternatively, phone numbers can also be used to fetch the IDs a person has if you have enabled it (it's by default)
Personal opinion: significantly. FedNow instant payments are a penny for up to $100k transfers, with the eventual plan to support up to $500k transfers.
I don't see how it would impact Apple Pay, for example. In Australia, we have instant payments already, and Apple/Google/Samsung Pay is used alongside it - completely separate.
What if someone don't use Messenger? Venmo/Paypal are still the most popular options in my circles, largely because they are not tied to any specific platform.
Since they're all owned by a company with an extremely polarizing public opinion, I imagine the reasons someone might not use one of them would likely double as reasons not to use the others, either.
E-commerce (mostly for IG) and payments (mostly for WA, somewhat for Messenger) have been parts of the Facebook bull case for a long time. Why do people think companies of >70k people can't focus on more than one product/service? Not you in particular, just generally, I spend more time than I'd like to admit on "fin-Twit" and people expect FB has suddenly buried every plan aside of VR since they rebranded. I would say however the spaghetti analogy is a bit dismissive considering that, when their projects do "stick to the wall", they spawn business-lines with 10 digit users.
Not that I have any objection to the hive mind thinking Reels and VR is the end-all be-all, I want it to think it's a dead business.
I figured I'd point out why you're (probably) being downvoted in case you don't understand. The problem of payments is obvious, it's literally ancient. It's a ridiculous and naive statement that anyone would have to look at WeChat to realize it's a valuable problem to solve.
WeChat Pay (Tencent) and AliPay (Alibaba) are both huge indeed. I have no clue how much cash they bring in, tho I would expect Visa and Mastercard make way more, but they are widely used, especially the former (WeChat is quite the super-app in China)
The reason why they would want this, in my interpretation anyway, is that there is a lot of product fit to have payments on WhatsApp. The app is widely used outside NA as the communication channel, namely by lots of SMBs that actively use it (see [0], that app is solely used for business owners as it's rather useless for a regular WA user). The monetizing opportunities on WA are deeply tied to SMBs, basically you should be able to operate a business on WA in which case you shouldn't have to go off-app once you get to payment, removing payment-middlemen is probably in the interest of all three parties involved too. Payments are necessary to enable "business over chat", you can also see them working on this with Click-to-WhatsApp/Click-to-Messenger ads and the acquisition of Kustomer. This is all valid for Messenger as well but I think that's more of a TBD, it's yet to prove itself popular for that kind of usage, tho there is a good fit for Marketplace and to compete with Venmo. It's also implemented on Facebook and Instagram for their respective Shops platforms, I don't think there's more to it than that for those.
Just like Apple Pay is a rounding error[1], I wouldn't bet on payments being a significant cash cow, not any time soon anyway, considering Facebook's approach to monetization. IMO it's more about deepening the moat and broadening the utility of the apps, especially WhatsApp as it tries to become something of a communication+commerce+payments super-app for Asia/Latam/Africa (credit cards and phone numbers would be rough to displace in North America and Europe, I sure as hell wouldn't bet on FB overtaking those). A Signal or a Telegram could take over a chatting app (if it somehow reaches, like, 2B people), it would be much harder (as if it wasn't hard enough to beat such a network effect) to take over a chatting app with a built-in suite of features for businesses and a user base that gets accustomed to commercial use of said app.
I could also be entirely wrong, I'm just an idiot that tries to follow the company.
My feed is full of former groups being overrun with blogspam. I've noticed it spiking in the last 3-6 months. That type of thing needs armies of people, and... well, facebook doesn't care.
Like the pre-google (well, and google search as of now) search engines, being overrun by spam signaled the end of the viability of the product. Either they don't have the resources to defend it, or they don't care. Reason doesn't matter.
I guess they've reached Google-levels of product management when their payment system used across 4 products is named after only one of them. Another Hangouts in the making.
"We want to rebrand to Meta to help our image, but let's name the payment app that'll be used across all of Meta after the specific brand that's been the focus of all of that bad publicity."
Seems to be the reason. In Brazil, everyone knows what Facebook is. Very, very, very few people would know what is Meta.
How ironic is it that you need to move from a brand name to another because you have bad reputation, but still have to use the old name because even with bad reputation, it's still more trustable to handle money than your no-reputation new brand?
Hmm, I hadn't realized it was branded differently in Brazil. Still seems to align with the same idea, since WhatsApp brand recognition is at least on par with Facebook in Brazil(also, I believe most people are aware that WhatsApp is made by FB, but I guess very few recognize Meta as of now).
Maybe they are scared that something shady about it will be exposed later so they are branding it with Facebook, an already tarnished name, and keeping the Meta brand clean?
> For extra security, set up a PIN, face ID or fingerprint to confirm a payment at checkout.
This doesn’t sound appealing to me. They’re surely storing this biometric data on a server somewhere, right? I use FaceID or my Apple Watch to pay with ApplePay all the time but my biometrics never leave my device.
I don’t follow Facebook all that closely (never used any of its services). Do they have other services that use (require?) face or fingerprint identification? Or is Facebook Pay a sly way for them to start harvesting this data?
Facebook should have dominated the payments space. It failed. Every few years they announce new payments products and strategy. Nothing fundamentally changes.
The company, which hasn't been able to figure out the UI hell of the core product for more than a decade
now must never be trusted with processing payments.
Especially when you know where the data will end up, what will happen to it next and how the company makes money (98.5% from targeted ads)
It’s really not. I’ve managed Facebook and Instagram ads for a non-profit educational group, sending Meta thousands of dollars for ad campaigns, and the UI for purchasing ads is poor, by the metric of whether the software “just works.”
There are separate webpages for creating a Facebook ad campaign (Ads Manager is one, plus there is a separate option with less features; I believe this is the Boosted posts function). The Ads Manager also displays a popup that the software might not work fi you have an ad-blocker enabled. For my devices, it’s slow and buggy in any browser except for Chrome.
The UI for managing Pages as a business is also poor. In the past (with previous Facebook Q&A forum posts documenting this), Facebook would automatically convert text posts by a Facebook page into a job listing, without asking for confirmation (!), making it unintuitive to undo. Separately, it also has limited categories for Facebook events (there is no category for educational events; the closest is the “Home” category).
Facebook has also removed certain popular features in the past, such as initially hiding, and then removing the feature to Share a post with the feature to “Keep the original post” (so only the link is shared, but not the post text that accompanied it by the original poster). The feature was lost due to a Facebook redesign, which is baffling because this reduced the likelihood of Facebook users to share content.
Maybe it’s different for larger customers (though I suspect they use the same tools), but the poor UI is frankly ridiculous for paying advertisers. Perhaps it does make sense, though; their competitor is Google Search and Display ads, which also have user interface problems (e.g. refusing to let you publish an ad set you’re willing to pay for, with very minimal messaging as to where exactly the error is, prompting multiple forum posts by other users). It’s effectively a duopoly, as other social media advertising channels are far less effective (maybe not LinkedIn, though LinkedIn is pricier), and newspaper ads are far more pricey (with higher minimum ad spend) with lower reach.
Not only that, but the amount of platforms they launched. First it was from your page, then they made a business page, then it became some ad manager, then it became facebook for business on a completely different URL. Not too mention the retooling and breaking what worked. Everytime I coached my client to work with FB ads, the system had changed again.
And that’s with the typical docs not reflecting the current state.
Centralized Social networks like Faceboon and WhatsApp can roll out a payment system nearly overnight and have it accepted at millions of merchants. Crypto after 10 years is hardly accepted anywhere…
This should have happened for a long time. Facebook's properties are the places where my friends naturally ask for money from me to help. Even with all the negativity I see here in other comments, this is the natural way for Facebook to grow, not trying to compete with the Federal Reserve.
In an ideal world I'd love to see social media apps be able to loosely hook in to banking apps. So facebook messenger would handle requests and you would tap "send" in facebook messanger which would open your bank app with something like "Send $10 to facebook user ___ and let facebook confirm transaction success" so facebook never has to hold your money or make transactions, but you can make payment requests in messenger.
Although I do remember that the US doesn't really have a good/fast way to make instant bank to bank transactions so that could be an issue.
PSDR2 (EU) and Open Banking (UK) regulations have this as a possibility.
I'm not up to speed on how fast implementation of the 'L2' has been, but this is a very real use case. And no need to open your banking app since delegation to your 3rd party app (Facebook in this case).
Jack Mallers (CEO of Strike) gave a presentation about the Lightning network as the open protocol for international fiat debit payments, and multiple Facebook managers were on that meeting. Now that Cashapp integrated sending money with it, Strike can be connected with US Chase bank account, the race for embracing the open protocol is on.
The cool thing with USD payments over lightning network is that capital gains tax is not triggered.
Facebook had a multimillion dollar business (yes, million, not trillion, but this was solid) in the form of FB marketplace. That was the one part of FB that was super useful and if they hooked it up with a secure payment system that worked with these kinds of transactions it could have been amazing. Instead they squandered it on ads, as they always do. The platform is now unusable.
Users are. Listings aren’t. Most of my feed is ads for online stores masquerading as local listings. Like legit 10 out of 12 are this. You can search but you can’t just see “what has been listed lately” and their AB testing keeps changing the UI slightly so you can’t always find the right filters anyways.
What you described has been available for a long time. The old Facebook Pay (i.e. the ability to send payments to your friends via ACH) has been available in Messenger for at least 5 years (probably even longer). This new Facebook Pay seems to just add an easy way to link payment methods to your account and pay merchants on Facebook/Instagram.
I'm just glad they're doing this properly. They wasted almost a decade on determining what everyone in the world already knew, i.e. ads in messaging products are just. not. gonna. work.
I guess that they were blinded by the margin discrepancy, like many others.
It seems to be using normal debit / credit card payments behind the scenes, so it’s not going to eat the banks’ lunch too much just yet. What would be really good is if they could do A2A payments and circumvent the Mastercard / Visa merchant payment rails and fees. That could be a game changer.
Sending money from a debit account is one thing, but where does the money go? An arbitrary number on a web page like PayPal, or would you get the money directly in your bank account?
Seems like this is 3 years behind everyone else... Which is a bigger issue than the branding itself. I couldn't find one aspect that made it have a competitive advantage over already established brands.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadNot that I want to help this company.
It's so fucking confusing now with "Facebook Pay on Instagram". WTF.
Meta Pay is even a catchier name.
> What you buy is your business. Your transactions are confidential—and aren't shared to your Newsfeed—unless you choose to share them.
So yeah. Confidentiality is defined as "not shared on your Newsfeed". Safe to assume Facebook is going to milk this data for all it's worth.
There are also some other whoppers:
> If there is an unauthorized Facebook Pay transaction on your account, customer support is always ready to help. Reach out via email 24 hours a day.
All I can say is: I'll believe it when I see it.
[1] https://pay.facebook.com/ca/security-and-protection/
... with a canned response saying "sorry, nothing we can do!"
From the FAQ:
> Is there Purchase Protection for online shopping?
> Purchases made through third-party sites, local pickups, Messenger transactions, or through other messaging services don't qualify for Purchase Protection. Learn more about how Purchase Protection works on Facebook.
I'm no Facebook fan, but let's be honest. Your bank, credit card company, and merchants are all doing exactly the same thing. Perhaps the bank is regulated tightly enough that it isn't quite as bad, but the others definitely are.
But they do ?
https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/consumer-privac...
> In 1999, Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB).
...
> Under GLB, companies can sell their customers’ financial data to anyone they choose, including credit card information such as the date, amount, and recipient of charges, and the personal details consumers provide when they fill out applications. Consumers have no privacy under federal regulations unless they affirmatively take steps to “opt out” of this sharing, repeating the process for each and every financial service provider who may have data about them.
...
> Even this opt-out option is not available for consumers to stop credit card companies and issuing banks from sharing this data with their financial affiliates and financial “joint marketers,” a vaguely defined term that provides a giant loophole in privacy protections.
PS. Just to make sure - I'm not trying to defend Facebook here, or credit card companies.
Although IIRC Facebook already buys some of this info from data brokers so...
And about storage, ok, read this:
Anti-fraud technology monitors purchases on our systems to detect unauthorized activity. Your payment method is not shared with buyers, sellers, or merchants without your consent, and is stored separately from your account data.
And tell me it doesn't say all payment data is stored on FB servers and mined by all their algorithms.
"""
You are not making a deposit as you don’t earn interest and you do not have FCS protection. Given the size of FB I don’t think this is a problem.
Yikes.
> How secure is Facebook Pay in online stores?
> To keep your information secure, your debit and credit card numbers are encrypted for safe and secure storage. This information won’t be shared with sellers.
> With Facebook Pay, you can create a PIN or use your device's face or fingerprint recognition to confirm payments. Learn how to set up a PIN for Facebook Pay.
> For transactions you make with Facebook Pay, you’ll receive payment confirmation details in an email. If you see a transaction you don’t recognize, please contact your bank or financial institution.
And
> Is there Purchase Protection for online shopping?
> Purchases made through third-party sites, local pickups, Messenger transactions, or through other messaging services don't qualify for Purchase Protection. Learn more about how Purchase Protection works on Facebook.
https://pay.facebook.com/faqs/
For EU countries this would probably be governed by the PSD2 payment services directive and the GDPR data protection.
Specifically, payment transaction data may reveal personal data and using it for other purposes than the payment itself would require explicit consent.
IANAL. It would be interesting if lawyers with up to data knowledge on financial regulations in various jurisdictions could elaborate on this.
This doesn't matter so much when sending money to friends, but an expected use case people imagine for facebook based p2p tx is fb marketplace, where you can buy things from random people online. A lot of fraud and sketchy behavior already happens there (eg. buying stolen products). Not being able to have easy reversion of such tx is bad for buyers (and good for fraudulent sellers).
Not sure if you're in the USA, but for US users, banks are pretty hands off this sort of behavior and will only reverse TX in serious fraud issues, but require the loser to pass a high bar to prove its fraud. Normal bank to bank tx is a "pull" model, so middle men services typically offer protection for the buyer to stop a "pull" in the case of fraud. Thats why the US has created many p2p services that are "push" based (eg. venmo, cash app), and why credit cards companies offer protections like charge reversal and take on that risk (you agree that you'll return money in a charge-back as a condition of VISA/etc letting you use the network).
The terrible thing is is that it's the easiest solution for me and my friend group to send money via Messenger.
The US has _really_ dropped the ball on any sort of easy-to-use, standardized money transfer. Zelle is the closest thing and it is a joke for every day usability.
https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....
Punch in the mobile number to the banking app and more often than not the mobile's owner name is displayed.
They’re also rolling out support for phone numbers as identifiers in addition to email addresses but my bank doesn’t seem to support sending to phone numbers (or registering mine as auto deposit) yet.
With UPI, you can connect your bank account (no matter which bank it is) with any UPI based payment app and create IDs which can be shared for receiving or requesting payments. (These IDs are unique on basis of both app and bank).
So I can connect my bank account to gpay and create a new ID. Send them to others who are using gpay or any other UPI app (bank apps also have UPI functionality built in). They can send the payment to the ID (which will be automatically added to my bank). This is instant.
It can also be used for requesting payment by others and I can accept or decline the request.
Alternatively, phone numbers can also be used to fetch the IDs a person has if you have enabled it (it's by default)
I am randomly banned from Zelle for no particular reason. AML misfire, I guess. They won't tell me.
I’m surprised it took this long.
Facebook having another set of datapoints on my personal life does.
Not that I have any objection to the hive mind thinking Reels and VR is the end-all be-all, I want it to think it's a dead business.
Edit: It’s WeChat. The SV giants are chasing the ubiquity that app enjoys.
The reason why they would want this, in my interpretation anyway, is that there is a lot of product fit to have payments on WhatsApp. The app is widely used outside NA as the communication channel, namely by lots of SMBs that actively use it (see [0], that app is solely used for business owners as it's rather useless for a regular WA user). The monetizing opportunities on WA are deeply tied to SMBs, basically you should be able to operate a business on WA in which case you shouldn't have to go off-app once you get to payment, removing payment-middlemen is probably in the interest of all three parties involved too. Payments are necessary to enable "business over chat", you can also see them working on this with Click-to-WhatsApp/Click-to-Messenger ads and the acquisition of Kustomer. This is all valid for Messenger as well but I think that's more of a TBD, it's yet to prove itself popular for that kind of usage, tho there is a good fit for Marketplace and to compete with Venmo. It's also implemented on Facebook and Instagram for their respective Shops platforms, I don't think there's more to it than that for those.
Just like Apple Pay is a rounding error[1], I wouldn't bet on payments being a significant cash cow, not any time soon anyway, considering Facebook's approach to monetization. IMO it's more about deepening the moat and broadening the utility of the apps, especially WhatsApp as it tries to become something of a communication+commerce+payments super-app for Asia/Latam/Africa (credit cards and phone numbers would be rough to displace in North America and Europe, I sure as hell wouldn't bet on FB overtaking those). A Signal or a Telegram could take over a chatting app (if it somehow reaches, like, 2B people), it would be much harder (as if it wasn't hard enough to beat such a network effect) to take over a chatting app with a built-in suite of features for businesses and a user base that gets accustomed to commercial use of said app.
I could also be entirely wrong, I'm just an idiot that tries to follow the company.
0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1276030/whatsapp-busines...
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1060577/apple-pay-revenu...
Because Facebook's core product is failing, and they should have all hands on deck to try to save it.
Like the pre-google (well, and google search as of now) search engines, being overrun by spam signaled the end of the viability of the product. Either they don't have the resources to defend it, or they don't care. Reason doesn't matter.
How ironic is it that you need to move from a brand name to another because you have bad reputation, but still have to use the old name because even with bad reputation, it's still more trustable to handle money than your no-reputation new brand?
This doesn’t sound appealing to me. They’re surely storing this biometric data on a server somewhere, right? I use FaceID or my Apple Watch to pay with ApplePay all the time but my biometrics never leave my device.
I don’t follow Facebook all that closely (never used any of its services). Do they have other services that use (require?) face or fingerprint identification? Or is Facebook Pay a sly way for them to start harvesting this data?
Especially when you know where the data will end up, what will happen to it next and how the company makes money (98.5% from targeted ads)
What do you mean by this?
'My boyfriend dumped me on this app last week. One star.'
'This app listens to my conversations and serves me ads. One star'.
At best it's the product not the applcation being reviewed. At worst, it's the general public howling at the moon.
There are separate webpages for creating a Facebook ad campaign (Ads Manager is one, plus there is a separate option with less features; I believe this is the Boosted posts function). The Ads Manager also displays a popup that the software might not work fi you have an ad-blocker enabled. For my devices, it’s slow and buggy in any browser except for Chrome.
The UI for managing Pages as a business is also poor. In the past (with previous Facebook Q&A forum posts documenting this), Facebook would automatically convert text posts by a Facebook page into a job listing, without asking for confirmation (!), making it unintuitive to undo. Separately, it also has limited categories for Facebook events (there is no category for educational events; the closest is the “Home” category).
Facebook has also removed certain popular features in the past, such as initially hiding, and then removing the feature to Share a post with the feature to “Keep the original post” (so only the link is shared, but not the post text that accompanied it by the original poster). The feature was lost due to a Facebook redesign, which is baffling because this reduced the likelihood of Facebook users to share content.
Maybe it’s different for larger customers (though I suspect they use the same tools), but the poor UI is frankly ridiculous for paying advertisers. Perhaps it does make sense, though; their competitor is Google Search and Display ads, which also have user interface problems (e.g. refusing to let you publish an ad set you’re willing to pay for, with very minimal messaging as to where exactly the error is, prompting multiple forum posts by other users). It’s effectively a duopoly, as other social media advertising channels are far less effective (maybe not LinkedIn, though LinkedIn is pricier), and newspaper ads are far more pricey (with higher minimum ad spend) with lower reach.
And that’s with the typical docs not reflecting the current state.
Centralized Social networks like Faceboon and WhatsApp can roll out a payment system nearly overnight and have it accepted at millions of merchants. Crypto after 10 years is hardly accepted anywhere…
"Crypto" is not that.
When people start keeping their balances INSIDE the system, it becomes its own currency. Like when people pay with PayPal without cashing out.
They can print more of it internally, and you wouldn't know. They can have fractional reserves, etc.
WhatsApp and Facebook have huge adoption. By contrast, after 10 years, crypto is nowhere near being a "peer to peer cash system".
Although I do remember that the US doesn't really have a good/fast way to make instant bank to bank transactions so that could be an issue.
I'm not up to speed on how fast implementation of the 'L2' has been, but this is a very real use case. And no need to open your banking app since delegation to your 3rd party app (Facebook in this case).
The cool thing with USD payments over lightning network is that capital gains tax is not triggered.
This is a bug, not a feature, to the US government.
[0]: https://freecycle.org
[0]: https://www.gumtree.com
Yeah, but only the latter is likely to be able to push them into the too-big-to-fail category.
I guess that they were blinded by the margin discrepancy, like many others.
For sending money inside a country is easy generally, international payments are much harder.
[1] https://pay.facebook.com/availability
Seems like this is 3 years behind everyone else... Which is a bigger issue than the branding itself. I couldn't find one aspect that made it have a competitive advantage over already established brands.
Amazing! I love paying!
In more than other methods?
https://xkcd.com/927/