WhatsApp, Facebook And Data
What we know about WhatsApp’s data sharing policy and what it means.
Unless you live under a rock, you have heard of an app that lets you message anyone, anywhere in the world for free, called WhatsApp. And if you know anything about WhatsApp, you’d know it was bought by Facebook back in 2014 for $12 billion. What on earth, you may think, made Facebook pay that much money for an app that only let you message your friends and family. Well some people say its data.
If you have been following tech related news lately, you may have heard of the whole WhatsApp fiasco. WhatsApp recently updated its privacy policy, and that didn’t work out well for them. There was massive confusion that led to a dramatic increase in the users switching over to WhatsApp’s competitor apps, Telegram and Signal, with both gaining 5.6 million and 7.5 million users respectively in the matter of 5 days. Things got so bad that WhatsApp had to release an official notification clarifying their stance.
So what was the update and what led to all this drama? Well, it wasn’t the update itself as much as it was the hype. The rumor was spread that WhatsApp’s new privacy policy would let it share its collection of data with Facebook, its mother company. Most of us thought it probably already was doing that. Well it was and it was not. Facebook knew how many hours we used either of its apps, it knew what layout we used, it knew where we were using cellular towers to detect our device. However, there is more personal data it wasn’t collecting on us, for example, neither Facebook, nor WhatsApp could peek into our personal conversations, they couldn’t use the share location feature to track us or check which of our contacts we stay in touch with.
The actual update is much different. According to WhatsApp’s new data sharing policy, WhatsApp will collect data from your messages, but those only business related ones. With ever growing online number of businesses, WhatsApp wants to mold itself into a platform that not only allows users to share messages among themselves, but also a platform where businesses and customers can communicate easily, as easily as we can communicate with our friends. And WhatsApp wants to collect data on those messages. It wants to track our business activity so it can show us related ads on Facebook and so that it could help businesses grow by also sharing some data with them.
However, that still may be considered too much of a breach of privacy by many, and to be fair it is. But it is not new levels of breach that we have not seen yet. Companies breach our business activity and data to share it with other businesses all the time. It is however understandable to see people freak out when they hear the phrases “Facebook” and “privacy” in the same sentence. Facebook has a reputation of being a reckless, irresponsible monopoly that has the power to over throw democracies and doesn’t really care about it. It has shown time and again that as long as its making money, all the social and societal costs that it incurs in our society is just a part of the business. It has used our data to harm our society, specially when it comes to creating algorithms to target people with political and ideological messages based on their history.
In conclusion, you can switch to Signal or Telegram if you want to stay away from anything Facebook and that would be a totally legitimate way to make a statement against a giant corporation trying to harm our society, bit if you’re merely concerned about your privacy, you can be assured that it’s safe, at least for now.
