Facebook has this long standing tradition of acquiring companies and their apps, vowing to always protect the user information of those apps, only to backtrack and utilise it for monetary gains sometime later. As a result, the latest news about WhatsApp’s change of policy, while quite alarming, doesn’t pack quite the shock it would have.
In a bid to monetise the platform, WhatsApp will be turning over user information to its parent company Facebook. Such user information will also include the user’s phone number as part of a plan that includes having businesses send messages to users on WhatsApp. WhatsApp users will be notified from the 25th of August onwards about the change to their policy, giving users a chance to opt out of the new shift in direction the company is taking. There are two ways to this, one is by opting out when you get the policy change information and the second is by going to the account settings in the app itself.
WhatsApp has stated that such messages from businesses would not entail spam but could instead be quite important, such as getting a message from a bank about fraudulent use of your account, or getting notified by an airline about your flight’s delay.
“By coordinating more with Facebook, we’ll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp. And by connecting your phone number with Facebook’s systems, Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them. For example, you might see an ad from a company you already work with, rather than one from someone you’ve never heard of.”
WhatsApp is keen to enforce that ads won’t be directly displayed on the app, but rather on Facebook itself.
WhatsApp heralded itself as an app that protects your privacy, going as far as to implement end-to-end encryption for all of its more than one billion users earlier in the year. But now it seems that was but a passing passage of time.
Source: WhatsApp
