"When something online is free, you're not the customer, you're the product."
Since its founding in 2009 by two former Yahoo employees Brian Acton and Jan Koum, WhatsApp has been one of the principal places to message family and friends across the globe. It enjoys more popularity outside of the United States with 2 billion users worldwide, mostly in Europe, India, Latin America, and many African nations.
Recently people have been fleeing from the service after it was announced that a new update will be making the messaging app share data with Facebook. If users don’t accept the new terms of the update, they’ll no longer be able to use the app. So, is it time for WhatsApp users to run for the hills? Is it all over? Let’s try and take a balanced look at this.
In 2014 WhatsApp was bought by Facebook for $19 billion in cash in stock. At the time 8 million users fled to the rival Russian app Telegram and the buyout was called, “A 9/11 for the Internet” by TechCrunch. Despite Facebook’s ownership, WhatsApp was still seen as a privacy-focused service. Since 2014 its developers built state-of-the-art end-to-end encryption into the app-based upon an open-source protocol that could be independently verified.
With this latest privacy update, user data can be shared with Facebook and any of the other companies it owns such as Instagram, Oculus VR, etc. So, what’s happening? Those who don’t accept the revamped privacy policy by February 8, 2021, will no longer be able to use the app. So what data is being with Facebook and Instagram? The shared data is,
- Profile Name
- Profile Picture
- IP Address
- Battery Level
- Signal Strength
- App Version
- Browser Information
- Mobile Network
- Connection Information (Phone Number, Carrier/ISP)
- Language and Time Zone
- Device Operations Information (Including identifiers unique to Facebook company products associated with the same device or account)
According to WhatsApp the purpose of this is to, “Offer integrations into cross Facebook company products which also includes Instagram and Messenger”, in other words to target adverts to you. For example, when you share a link of a product like a new smartphone you’re interested in or a wireless headphone to a friend or a family member in a WhatsApp message, WhatsApp can share that information to other Facebook companies to display targeted ads to you on Instagram or Facebook. The policy also notes that even after deleting the app some data will remain with the company.
The new policy is so aggressive that it doesn’t apply in the EU because it violates GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) laws. It is interesting to note that in 2019 on their company website WhatsApp stated that that privacy was in their DNA but in 2020 this statement was removed. To many users, it seems like WhatsApp is no longer a privacy-focused product.
Signal and Telegram messaging apps are now seeing a sudden increase in demand after the news broke on Social Media. Signal’s popularity shot up even further after it was endorsed by Elon Musk, more than 100K users installed Signal on Apple’s Appstore and the Google Play Store. And in just a few days following the news Telegram picked up 25 million downloads. New installs for WhatsApp fell 11% in the first seven days of 2021 compared with the prior week. It should be noted that a singular data point isn’t a trend.
While some media outlets are claiming that the sky is falling, WhatsApp has actually been sharing user information and metadata with Facebook since 2016. In fact, the European Commission would find Facebook for being misleading during its 2014 takeover of WhatsApp. Facebook at the time said that “It would be technically impossible to automatically combine user information from Facebook and WhatsApp”, but in 2016 they did just that. Facebook’s explanation for the misleading statements in their filing was simply that was “Not Intentional”.
Besides, Facebook also promised to keep WhatsApp as a standalone product, but this promise too was broken. Back in 2016, they offered existing users 30 days to opt-out of the data sharing with Facebook. If you chose to opt-out at that time, WhatsApp would continue to honor that choice. This opt-out feature has been long gone and all new users after this time automatically had their data shared with Facebook. But according to Wired Magazine, the most recent privacy policy changes do not actually impact WhatsApp’s existing practices or behavior around data sharing with Facebook. The policy update was simply a clarification on how user data was shared. So, the buzz on the internet is mostly an overreaction, since this has been going on since 2016.
But that being said, the amount of data WhatsApp can collect and share about you and the fact that it’s been consistently sharing this with Facebook is still concerning. The merger of Facebook and WhatsApp was controversial within the company and it may have contributed to the departure of both WhatsApp’s co-founders in late 2017 and 2018 respectively. One of whom went on to work on Signal. Though the new WhatsApp privacy policy doesn’t change WhatsApp’s behavior since 2016, it can be a reminder that a lot of the apps that we use for free cost nothing because it’s in fact us that are being sold to product advertisers. Fortunately for users, there’s some great alternative privacy focussed messaging apps like Signal or Telegram. So, what do you folks think, are you going to switch to alternatives like Signal or Telegram, or are you okay with targeted advertising? Feel free to discuss below and thanks for reading the whole article.