Facebook gets a new logo

After 15 long years, Facebook has finally unveiled a new company logo. The company says that the rebranding is essential to help differentiate between the company and the Facebook app.

The latest logo just says ‘FACEBOOK’ but capitalized and in a generic font. A GIF displayed the FACEBOOK wordmark in different colors to represent the various brands under it – like blue for Facebook proper, green for WhatsApp and pinkish for Instagram, etc.

The logo will be spread across all Facebook products and marketing materials in the coming weeks. The IT services giant will also be adding the “from Facebook” into some of its apps and the company is planning to embed this logo for the process instead of the traditional blue Facebook wordmark.

Facebook said that the latest logo push is to make users are aware that the company has a larger presence in the apps they use daily like WhatsApp and Instagram.

“People should know which companies make the products they use,” stated Antonio Lucio, Chief Marketing Officer at Facebook. He also added that. “Our main services include the Facebook app, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Portal, and Calibra. These apps and technologies have shared infrastructure for years and the teams behind them frequently work together.”

The US asks Facebook to build back doors in messaging services

Facebook is about to beef up its end-to-end encryption to fight off the criticism that has been lingering over its head for many years now but unfortunately, the tech giant’s plan to improve privacy and security is also being criticized by the government.

According to reports, Facebook was planning to introduce strong encryption in WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger to further protect user privacy but now the government is desisting its efforts saying it will be dangerous in the long run.

Apparently, the government is okay with implementing such security features like end-to-end security as long as the companies who provide them can create a backdoor to this technology and have a key with them.

But the tech companies are stating both technical and practical reasons against this demand of the government because according to them if a company has backdoor access and has encryption keys, it’d only be a matter of time before it falls into the wrong hands and causes havoc. Not having a key ensures that hackers cannot bypass security.

This poses a challenge to the government because if the tech companies themselves can’t open up the security they provide, it’d cause disruption of investigations. This debate has been going on for a while. Apple was asked to unlock an iPhone in 2016 but the company had declined the request by stating that doing this would create a backdoor for all apple devices.

The future of Messenger is inadvertently disclosed

It seems like Facebook has leaked the future of Messenger way too early. It is believed that Facebook will rework on the app’s code while making it accessible in almost all platforms. It is possible that Facebook will make the announcement of revising all its products at the F8 conference.

It is expected that Mark Zuckerberg will stress more on the solutions for security and privacy following many data scandals. The announcements were made live; perhaps unknowingly which has been removed now and the links show an error page.

When the post was visible, the plans were to update the Facebook application, bring in new features and the company’s future thoughts on the development. Some of them being reworking on the Messenger app with the updated app being larger in size compared to the existing one.

The app will also be available to desktops, for Windows and MacOS. Facebook said that this new version is under trial which will be introduced probably by the end of this year.

It is believed that these new features are brought to the current Facebook Messenger too. An addition to it is “Watch Parties” that will permit people to have interactions with friends and watch the video at a time. For example, you can converse with people around the globe while the video is being played.

The company will make this app end-to-end encrypted as a push towards privacy and security. The conversations will be kept a secret, which cannot be accessed by Facebook also.