WhatsApp messenger that is owned by Facebook, started to notify its users about the latest privacy policy update. Basically, if you want to continue using the messaging app you are expected to adopt new rules, which, as stated by the company, will help it better incorporate with other products from Facebook. The news have already angered the tech community, privacy advocates, popular entrepreneurs and government institutes. But most importantly, it has provoked the leak of users.
What’s Happening with WhatsApp?
To put it simply, WhatsApp now reserves the right to share the data gathered about you from all Facebook resources, including Instagram. Actually, it does not even matter whether you have accounts and profiles in these social networks or not. At first sight, the messenger’s marketing policy has not changed much, but now it clearly states that “WhatsApp receives information from other Facebook companies and shares information with them”, and this data can be applied to advance the sales strategy. The capacity to share data in the possession of Zuckerberg was there before too, yet only on a voluntary basis, but from February 8th it is mandatory.
Will Facebook Have Access to Your WhatsApp?
Short answer is – No. Since your conversations are encrypted using end-to-end encryption, the company, even WhatsApp itself cannot access them. But by using the messenger, you can share your contact list, location, financial information, and other data like your phone’s ID.
WhatsApp CEO Will Cathcart has already announced that neither the messenger itself nor Facebook can track personal calls and messages. It is probably worth mentioning that this statement appeared only after the founder of Telegram Pavel Durov joined the discussion. He believed that it is impossible to ensure the encryption and privacy of WhatsApp, as their code is undisclosed.
Do All Countries Follow the Same Rules?
Certainly not. The context and conditions for Europe would be different from the directives for the rest of the world. For example, let’s take the U.S. WhatsApp directly states the wish that users link their account to Facebook Pay “for purchases at WhatsApp” and chat with friends using other Facebook products, including Portal, “using WhatsApp account”.
However, there are no such regulations in the European version of the new Privacy Policy. This can be explained by certain EU laws, according to which companies will be forced to pay a fine of up to 4% of global annual revenue for breaking privacy rules.
Possible Consequences
The reaction of the world community has by now evidently hurt the messenger. The press service of the President and the Ministry of Defense of Turkey said that their country would remove WhatsApp completely. And billionaire Elon Musk has openly supported the rival app Signal, promoting it to his 42 million Twitter followers. Already on January 10, there were so many people who wanted to roll with Signal that its servers could not hold the record traffic.
Thus, changes in the WhatsApp app policy have ruined people’s trust in the app. People are always looking for a better and more protected replacement. And at the moment Signal seems to be the best option. Trying to set apart from other messaging apps, Signal stores only users’ basic contact information.
Signal also uses end-to-end encryption in all dialogs. Meaning that all messages that are sent and forwarded by chat participants at the very beginning are encrypted with a specific key, and then decrypted directly on the user’s own device. With that, the company does not have to process messages and lock any content on its servers.
Conclusion
Thinking that Signal might ever completely replace WhatsApp as the most popular messenger is a bit of an overstatement, given that WhatsApp still has an extensive user base of more than 2 billion people worldwide. Nevertheless, it’s still nice to see that privacy is prioritized by people, and potentially Signal might even become an industry standard in prospective.
