On January 4th of this year, WhatsApp published its privacy policy updates online and caused a bit of a frenzy among its users. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call it a controversy based around the private message application that is also a Facebook Business now. Rightly so, if you look at the global number of users this App has, it crosses over 2 Billion.
Many are calling the updates a breach of privacy on the private social media giant’s behalf, even after WhatsApp itself cleared misunderstandings around sharing any private users’ data with Facebook. Additionally, this generation’s been known to deal with all things, fun or serious with humor, and that’s why the internet has been having a field day of it. People are relentlessly making and engaging with content that is based around Facebook having access to people’s data through this platform.
Here’s a summary of the overall pointers WhatsApp left in their update statement:
- WhatsApp has access to some of the users’ data, which is mentioned in the application’s terms of service, that they require in order to provide the services that are the core of their platform. This includes the contact number, name, your connections, status update, transactions, and payments are the top examples of data that you provide. Then there’s automatically collected info which includes, usage and log info, device and connection info, location info, and any remaining ones found from cookies, that is if you allow the app to access it.
- WhatsApp gets access to your data from third-party sources that are involved with both you as the user and WhatsApp users, such as your logbook contacts that might be using WhatsApp and provide any data or any Facebook company products.
- WhatsApp does not have access to any other private or group chat data of users’, apart from some messages that might not have delivered, in this case, the application stores the message/media to be sent as soon as fluency in the network is maintained.
- WhatsApp does not share any of its users’ data with Facebook, whether they have access to it or not. There is an entire policy in place that makes sure none of the users’ data gets to anyone who is not authorized to access it. However, they also wrote, “We are one of the Facebook Companies. You can learn more further below in this Privacy Policy about the ways in which we share information across this family of companies”. This is probably where so many people got foggy about the exact policy rules of the platform.
There are more detailed pointers that WhatsApp itself published, available on their platform to go through thoroughly. Despite different statements on multiple platforms, the company still faces backlash and trolling from users. As a digital media agency, all we are concerned with is that people don’t opt out of either Facebook or WhatsApp in a quest to protect their private data and switch to other platforms that are not as polished in terms of business and advertisement features as the Facebook companies are.
