Facebook allows merging of community Pages into official Pages

I just heard via InsiderFacebook Facebook has added a new “Merge” option to the Resources tab of the Page editor. 

InsiderFacebook says:

It allows Page admins to apply to roll duplicate community Pages into an identically named official Page they control, adding the fans and check-ins of the community Pages to the official Page. Facebook has privately done this kind of merger in the past for prominent celebrities and businesses, but the option has never before been publicly available.

The merge tool will allow official Page admins to gain the ability to publish content to and target with ads users who’ve accidentally Liked an unofficial version of their Page, helping some Pages instantly grow to their rightful size.

Broadly, I think that this is news to be welcomed:  when community Pages were first released on the world, we had some very serious concerns about their impact for brands, notably the message dilution and loss of share of audience, which this move with counter.  I assume though that this will need to be an ongoing job for Page managers, as new community pages are opened all the time.

There are still some unanswered questions though: will users who 'like' a community page which is then merged with a brand page suddenly start receiving status updates to which they haven't subscribed (i.e. they didn't activity 'Like' a brand page, which the knowledge of all that entails)? Doesn't that contravene some data protection laws? If you know the answer, please get in touch.  And if you've gone through the process of applying to merge a community Page with Facebook, I'd love to kow how it went.