WhatsApp has been sharing metadata with Facebook for many years now, so it’s new policy wouldn’t have changed much for users. But that doesn’t mean that people should not be concerned about their privacy.
WhatsApp announced that it will delay its new privacy policy by a month, from February 8 to May 15, after facing a lot of backlash. The reaction was so strong that millions of new users signed up for alternatives such as Telegram and Signal — around 25 million new users signed up for Telegram in just three days, and Signal became the number one app in its category in many parts of the world, bringing on so many people that it couldn’t keep up with the demand, and took nearly two days to resolve a major outage that started on Friday. Facebook-owned WhatsApp launched its new privacy policy with the goal to address how people will talk to businesses. The data collected would only relate to business chats, WhatsApp clarified, released an FAQ page on its site to emphasise that it doesn’t read private messages. « WhatsApp was built on a simple idea: what you share with your friends and family stays between you. This means we will always protect your personal conversations with end-to-end encryption, so that neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can see these private messages. It’s why we don’t keep logs of who everyone’s messaging or calling. We also can’t see your shared location and we don’t share your contacts with Facebook, » it said in a blog post, and added: « This update does not expand our ability to share data with Facebook. » This, coupled with Signal’s issues which lasted more than a day before being fully resolved, might have people thinking that they can go back to WhatsApp — it remains a very reliable service, and the company showed that it’ll listen to the users, right? The fact is that WhatsApp already shares a lot of information with Facebook.
