This is why you shouldn’t be accepting WhatsApp’s new privacy policy!
On January 5, Facebook owned WhatsApp started showing an alert message something that couldn’t be ignored. Let me share the screenshot with you if haven’t received it yet.
A young undergraduate’s dream to have online index of his University friends quickly grew up to become a huge centralized database, containing billions of profiles worldwide, now recognized as Facebook. But what is the reason for it being always surrounded by hatred from a large community despite it being traded as one of the top 10 largest publicly listed company worldwide?
Among over 75 acquisitions in its 15 years of dominance, Facebook gained control of some of the biggest social media platforms including Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook has been the subject of numerous controversies most of which are related to its User Privacy policies, data stealing, mass surveillance etc.
For instance, the 2016 US Presidential election was influenced by Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data theft of millions of American users. Facebook willingly allowed CA to access user’s and their friends’ public profile, page likes, current city and even sensitive and non-disclosable contents like their news feed, timeline and even private messages. It was only in 2018 that Facebook was sued for the data scandal by UK government. In 2010, the Wall Street Journal found that many of Facebook’s top-rated apps — including apps from Zynga and Lolapps — were transmitting identifying information to “dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies” like RapLeaf. [1]
Let’s come back to our original topic. If you haven’t read the new WhatsApp privacy policy yet, let me summarize it for you.
“Information shared with Facebook through WhatsApp including (but not limited to) Phone number, Profile name, Photo, Online status, Status messages, Last seen, Receipts, Users you communicate with may be available to anyone who uses the service.
All the aforementioned type of information (and some non-listed) may be available to third party providers for Facebook — WhatsApp venture to operate, support and market their services.”
Although the privacy policy states that all these features are in opt-out basis, it is highly doubtful why these aren’t meant as opt-in features where users can select what they wish to share. For instance, 60% of WhatsApp users would have never really checked Privacy options in the settings tab, even if they are aware of these settings.
Another clause from the privacy policy states that (directly pasted)
“We joined the Facebook family of companies in 2014. As part of the Facebook family of companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information with, this family of companies. We may use the information we receive from them, and they may use the information we share with them, to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services and their offerings.”
This means that even if you don’t opt for sharing your data with Facebook and it’s (unknown, non-disclosed) partners, WhatsApp will have your consent (because you agreed to use their services) to share your data with these entities. Although the data shared with Facebook will not be directly visible in feeds, it will remain in their servers for further analytical purposes. It is clearly a statement citing that the new WhatsApp will be more tightly integrated with the Facebook services to improve their advertisements and products.
Keeping all this in mind, do you really think, Facebook is concerned about your privacy? Do you really think opting in for the new changes in WhatsApp will be same as it was before?
The new richest man of the world recently tweeted something, which caught everyone’s attention.
Its worthwhile to note that WhatsApp uses the very same End to End encryption method that Signal had designed in collaboration but nonetheless, they never marketed the technology as such. Not to mention, Signal is another American competitor in social messengers’ market with better End to End encryption and User privacy (they don’t store user’s messages in cloud) options.
A relatively new player, Telegram, came along from its Russian origin, then migrating their servers to about 5 other countries because of their conflict with the local government’s privacy policies, has been harnessing quite some new users in the mean time. This is all because of their homegrown End to End encryption, features like Channels, Secret Chat, Super groups (groups with more than 100000 participants when WhatsApp only allows a maximum of 255), innovative encrypted Voice and Video calls, Cloud drive (Saved Messages) and robust privacy policy.
At the end of the day, it’s your choice if you want to opt in for the new enforcing policies of WhatsApp to share your data willingly to companies you might have never heard of or switch to alternatives like Signal or Telegram which have much better Open privacy statements.
Thanks for reading.
