Facebook is reportedly working to create a single underlying messaging platform for WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. 

The three apps will remain separate, but they'll be brought together under a single messaging platform or protocol. A shared protocol will allow you to send messages from one of the company's chat systems to another -- so you could speak to your Messenger-only friends without leaving WhatsApp.

According to a Friday story in The New York Times, which cites people working on the project, the goal is to complete the work by early 2020. The new backend would support end-to-end encryption for secure messaging, one of the the main reasons people use WhatsApp.

"We want to build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. "We're working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks. 

"As you would expect, there is a lot of discussion and debate as we begin the long process of figuring out all the details of how this will work."

This isn't a surprising move from a business standpoint: Maintaining separate code bases usually turns out to be impractical after acquisitions for a variety of reasons. But given Facebook's continually declining reputation with respect to the privacy and security (and more) of its users, the idea that it may be able to link a relatively anonymous WhatsApp account with an it-knows-everything-about-the-real-me Facebook or Instagram account may not sit well with some people.