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WhatsApp hours after has announced a new privacy policy to nearly 2,000 billion people around the world who use it, the rumors hit it fast and thick.
“Don’t accept WhatsApp’s new policy,” said one of the messages that went viral on the platform. “Once that’s done, your WhatsApp account will be linked to your Facebook account and Zuckerberg can see all of your chats.”
“In a few months, WhatsApp will launch a new version that will show ads based on your chats,” said another. “Don’t accept the new policy!”
Thousands of similar messages went viral on WhatsApp, an instant messaging app owned by Facebook, in the days that followed. Millions of people sung by celebrities like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Edward Snowden presaka Download WhatsApp alternatives like Signal and Telegram.
There was only one problem: under the 4,000-word policy, it was clear that the new changes only applied to people using WhatsApp to talk to businesses, not private conversations with friends and family.
No, the new terms would not allow Facebook to read your WhatsApp chats, he explained to anyone who asked the company. They have published the CEOs long threads Go to Twitter and give interviews the company’s largest market for major Indian publications. WhatsApp spent millions buying first-page ads from major newspapers released graphics unlocking the rumors on his website with a big “Share WhatsApp” button, hoping to get the truth into the stream of misinformation that runs through his platform. The company encouraged Facebook employees to share these infographics, according to those posted on the Workplace in its internal message board.
“There has been a lot of misinformation and confusion, so we are providing detailed information on how WhatsApp protects people’s personal conversations,” a WhatsApp spokesman told BuzzFeed News. “We are using our Status feature to communicate directly with people on WhatsApp, as well as post detailed information on dozens of languages on social media and on our website. Of course, we have also made these resources available to people who work in our company. they can respond directly to relatives. “
It didn’t work.
“There has been a lot of misinformation that has caused concern and we all want to help understand our principles and facts,” WhatsApp wrote. blog post last week the company announced it would delay the new privacy policy by three months. “We will do much more to clarify the misinformation about the privacy and security of WhatsApp,” he wrote.
Thank you all for coming. We continue to work to address the issues by communicating directly with @WhatsApp users. No one will suspend or delete their account on February 8th and we will return business plans until May – https://t.co/H3DeSS0QfO
Twitter
For years, there have been rumors and scams spreading through WhatsApp it fueled the disinformation crisis in some of the world’s most populous countries, Brazil and India, where the app is the main way most people talk to each other. Now, that crisis has hit the company.
“It’s about trusting platforms [at a] the background, ”Claire Wardle, founder and director of the nonprofit First Draft, a nonprofit that investigates misinformation, told BuzzFeed News. So when privacy policies change, people are very concerned about what that means. “
Wardle said people are concerned that WhatsApp’s behavior in the app would connect them to data from Facebook accounts.
“Facebook and WhatsApp have a huge trust deficit,” said Pratik Sinha, Alt News, founder of India’s data verification platform. “After that, any misinformation attributed to you is easily consumed.”
What Sinha and Wardle have not added is not an understanding of how technology and privacy work among ordinary people. “Confusion grows with misinformation,” Wardle said, “people saw policy changes, jumped to conclusions, and, surprisingly, a lot of people believed the rumor.”
These misinformation patterns that have progressed over the years on WhatsApp have often caused damage. In 2013, a video was shot in Muzaffarnagar, a city in northern India, showing two young people allegedly lynching, killing dozens of people, causing clashes between Hindu and Muslim communities. A a police investigation has been found the video was more than two years old and was not even filmed in India. In Brazil, fake news the platform overflowed and was used to support the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who won the country’s 2018 presidential election.
But the company didn’t take its misinformation issue seriously until 2018, with rumors about child kidnappers immersed in the platform series of violent lynchings All over India. It was released at the time in a statement from the Indian Ministry of IT warn WhatsApp received legal action and said it would be treated as an “agent” if the company did not resolve the issue, sending WhatsApp into crisis mode. He moved senior officials from his headquarters in Menlo Park, California to New Delhi to meet with government officials and journalists and conduct major awareness campaigns about misinformation.
Sam Panthaky / Getty Images
Protest against mafia lynchings in July 2018 in India. Dozens of people were lynched across the country last year thanks to rumors of WhatsApp, and Indian authorities and WhatsApp were making efforts to find a solution.
He built new features in the app for the first time to deal directly with misinformation, e.g. tagging forwarded messages and restrictive to slow down a round content a portion of the content can be forwarded. In August last year start too allowing people from a few countries to upload the text of a message to Google to verify that the forwarding was fake. The feature is not yet available for WhatsApp users in India.
Since then, the company has been at work In a tool that would allow users to search for images captured in the app in 2019 with a single touch, a move that would help people more easily check the movement. But almost two years later, there is no trace of the feature, although a text version is available in a dozen countries that do not include India so far.
“We are still working on the function of the search tool,” a WhatsApp spokesman told BuzzFeed News.
WhatsApp said the company wanted to shed more light on its new privacy policy. “We want to strengthen this update by expanding the ability to share data with Facebook. Our goal is to provide transparency and new opportunities to connect with businesses so that they can serve and grow customers,” the spokesman said. “WhatsApp will always protect personal messages through extreme encryption so that neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can see them. We remain available to deal with misinformation and clarify any doubts.”
This week, the company posted a Status message, the equivalent of WhatsApp’s story on Facebook, at the top of people’s Status section. Pressing the situation revealed numerous messages to dispel the company’s rumors.
BuzzFeed News screenshots
“WhatsApp doesn’t share your contacts with Facebook,” the former said. Two other updates to the situation made it clear that WhatsApp can’t see people’s location and can’t read or listen to encrypted personal conversations. “We are committed to your privacy,” the final message said.
On Thursday, staff asked questions to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg before weekly questions, according to internal communications seen by BuzzFeed News. Some wanted to know if the move to Signal and Telegram was increasingly affecting the use and growth of WhatsApp. Others wanted CEOs to correct whether or not Facebook used metadata from WhatsApp to deliver ads.
“You think we could do a better job of explaining it clearly [the new privacy policy] users? “someone asked.
“The public is angry about @S WhatsApp changing PrivPolicy,” another person commented. “There is a lot of distrust of the FB. We should be more careful.”
Zuckerberg responded that he did not believe the company handled the changes well.
“The short answer is no, I don’t think we handled this well enough,” he said. “And I think the team is already engaged with all of that and has a lot of lessons to look forward to to make sure we do a better job, not just in WhatsApp TOS services. But you know, we have other TOS updates for different apps and services. In this way, we reduce the amount and amount of misinformation that arises and minimize the confusion that arises. “
Ryan Mac has made his contribution.
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