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Last week, nearly 2 billion people worldwide using WhatsApp, an instant messaging service owned by Facebook, were greeted with a huge pop-up when they launched the app.
“WhatsApp is updating its terms and privacy policy,” he said.
Clicking created 4,000 words privacy policy, says WhatsApp will now reserve the right to share data shared with Facebook and other Facebook platforms like Instagram and phone numbers, IP addresses and payments made through the app. It also says that if people use WhatsApp to manage these chats to talk to businesses that use Facebook’s hosting technology, the message can be used by the company to target people with Facebook ads.
Unless people accept these new conditions, they will be out of WhatsApp on February 8th.
Online, the reaction was swift. “Use signal” he tweeted Tesla CEO Elon Musk told his 42 million followers, referring to the open source WhatsApp alternative, that is popular among people who treat sensitive information like journalists and activists. “I use [Signal] every day and I’m not dead yet ” he tweeted American txistu player Edward Snowden. In Turkey, it was announced by the media office of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the country’s defense ministry WhatsApp is falling apart after changing the policy, he opened an examination of the movement.
Signal became the best free app in Google and Apple’s app stores in most countries around the world. More than 8,800,000 people downloaded Signal on iPhones and Android phones in the week of January 4, up from 246,000 last week, according to data analysis company Sensor Tower. Telegram, another alternative to WhatsApp, he said on Tuesday more than 25 million people gathered in the last 72 hours.
???? More than 5 million people downloaded #Signal this weekend after @elonmusk and @Snowden tweeted about it ???? ???????? #privacy #whatsapp Our report ???? https://t.co/qgRqvJ6940
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“I was concerned about my privacy,” J. Paul, a marketing professional in Mumbai, who only wanted to identify with the beginning of his name, told BuzzFeed News. “Facebook earns products in ways that are invasive for users.”
Not only Facebook itself, WhatsApp is the biggest and most popular service on Facebook. It is an application in markets like Brazil and India the default way communication for hundreds of millions of people. But so far Facebook, which paid $ 22 billion in 2014 to acquire it in 2014, has been largely independent and has not tried to make money. Now, that is changing.
“We remain committed to the privacy and security of people’s private messages,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told BuzzFeed News and offered a link to the page explaining the company’s new policy earlier this week. “The best way to sustain long-term end-to-end encryption is to have a business model that protects people’s private communication.”
The page says WhatsApp believes that sending messages to companies is different than sending messages to friends and family, and breaks down data that the company may share with Facebook in the future.
The new privacy policy for Facebook earned more than $ 21 billion in revenue in the last quarter of 2020 by targeting ads to people who can use WhatsApp to make even more money. But doing so means trying to supply more data to the app’s large user base, and many of them could risk being sent to competitors.
“Sooner or later, if you spend $ 22 billion getting something, shareholders want that asset to make money,” Mishi Choudhary, a New York-based technology lawyer and online civil rights activist, told BuzzFeed News.
Yahoo, started by two former Yahoo employees, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, originally charged people a dollar a year. After Facebook used the app for free, the growth exploded. In the first years after buying the app in 2014, Facebook largely left WhatsApp alone. But in 2018, he launched WhatsApp Business, which allowed businesses to use WhatsApp to communicate with customers. For the first time, Facebook wanted WhatsApp to start generating revenue.
Over the past year, WhatsApp has added more business-oriented features, such as flight tickets and purchase documents, catalogs, and payments. WhatsApp said there are more than 50 million businesses on the platform, and more than 175 million people send a message in the app to a business every day.
“They want WhatsApp to become a payment service and shopping portal, another aspect of your life that will cover your Facebook data collection efforts,” said Devdutta Mukhopadhyay, a lawyer for the Internet Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit that works to protect digital. freedoms, he told BuzzFeed News. “That’s what their new privacy policy changes.”
“I don’t trust Facebook,” Paul said. He recently deactivated his Facebook account, although he still uses Instagram and WhatsApp. “They ask me to be in it, but I don’t trust them,” he said.
WhatsApp’s trust has waned since Facebook bought it. Koum advocated selling the app to Facebook in 2014 blog post, stating that the company was not interested in the personal data of the persons. “If partnering with Facebook meant we had to change our values, we wouldn’t do it,” he wrote. Two years later, however, WhatsApp he announced began to share some data, the last time people used phone numbers and services with Facebook – the move by the European Union fine 110 million euros.
There is misinformation as a result of the current reaction. Many people didn’t realize that WhatsApp’s new privacy policy only applied to chats with businesses and not to private conversations with friends and family, and asked others to boycott the app.
“I honestly don’t think most people who are furiously switching to Signal or Telegram today have read the new privacy policy,” Mukhopadhyay said. “Whatever the complex legal documents say, people’s experiences tell them that they can’t trust companies like Facebook with the data.”
In response, Facebook is making an offensive charm. In India, the company’s largest company with more than 400 million users, the company splashed the front pages of major national newspapers with full-page ads to make it clear that it could not see or hear people’s private messages. “Respect for your privacy is encoded in our DNA,” the WhatsApp ad said, in line with a line posted on Koum’s 2014 blog.
Top Facebook executives, for example Head of Instagram and Facebook the head of virtual reality, they tweeted in favor of the app.
On Friday, WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart also wrote a few tweets stressing how the company couldn’t see people’s personal chats and that the new privacy policy only applied to messages with businesses.
“It is important for us to be clear that this update describes business communication and does not change WhatsApp data sharing practices with Facebook,” he wrote. “It doesn’t affect the way people communicate privately with friends or relatives in places around the world.”
Cathcart has not responded to BuzzFeed News’ comment request.
Despite the claim, leaving WhatsApp in countries like India could be tough. Paul, a Mumbai marketing professional, said he would continue to use the app until he asked everyone he knew to go to Signal.
“It’s not easy to sell,” he said, “because WhatsApp is convenient.”
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