WhatsApp announced that it would delay its new privacy policy by a few months, from February 8 to May 15, after facing widespread backlash. The response was so strong that millions of new users signed up for alternatives such as Telegram and Signal. Around 25 million new users signed up for Telegram in just three days and Signal became the number one app in its category in many parts of the world. , drawing so many people that it couldn’t keep up with demand, and it took nearly two days to resolve a major outage that began Friday.
Facebook-owned WhatsApp has launched its new privacy policy in a bid to shape how people will talk to businesses. The data collected would only concern professional discussions, WhatsApp clarified, publishing an FAQ page on its site to emphasize that it does not read private messages.
“WhatsApp was built on a simple idea: what you share with friends and family stays between you. That means we’ll always protect your personal conversations with end-to-end encryption, so neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can see “These private messages. That’s why we don’t keep logs of everyone’s messages or calls. We also can’t see your shared location and we don’t share your contacts with Facebook,” he said in a blog post, before adding: “This update does not expand our ability to share data with Facebook.
This, coupled with Signal issues that lasted more than a day before being fully resolved, could lead people to think they can switch back to WhatsApp – it remains a very reliable service, and the company has shown that she would listen to the users, right. ?
The fact is that WhatsApp already shares a lot of information with Facebook. When he said the update didn’t expand the ability to share data with Facebook, that’s because it’s been able to share your data for years now.
That’s not to say there hasn’t been a lot of misinformation over the past week. If you’re the type of person who was already using Signal, you’ve probably been asked multiple times a day if people should switch apps. And you’ve probably also been asked: “Does WhatsApp read my groups and messages?” And the simple answer is no, your messages don’t get read (unless you’re the target of something like the Pegasus hack, or someone has access to your phone, or has access to your cloud backups.. . there will always be some exceptions). WhatsApp uses the same end-to-end encryption as Signal, and unlike Telegram, WhatsApp enables E2E by default in all chats, whereas you have to start a secret chat in Telegram.
But a lot of other factors that people are very concerned about have always been the case. An image that has gone viral shows App Store privacy labels that tell you what information an app collects. Although Signal does not collect any data related to you, WhatsApp reviews your purchases, financial information, location, contact details, contacts, content, logins, usage data, and diagnostics.
This is something that hasn’t changed even though WhatsApp immediately changed its mind about enforcing its policies. If you were worried about Mark Zuckerberg looking at your messages, that wouldn’t happen anyway.
But since 2016, WhatsApp has I have shared a lot of other data with Facebook, and this will continue. If you look at the “Affiliates” section of the privacy policy, it explains that Facebook may use the data it collects about you to profile you more accurately and use it to serve ads or show friend suggestions, e.g. example. So he could (as a hypothetical example) know that you often visit Decathlon stores in real life, and therefore fill your Instagram feed with a lot more ads for fitness products.
As note According to researcher Wolfie Christl, Facebook said in 2014 that it would not be able to reliably match Facebook and WhatsApp accounts. This was obviously not true. But where there are strict laws to protect user privacy, WhatsApp must toe the line. In Europe, the company offers a different privacy policy.
In India, the government has been discussing a data protection law for several years. After many false starts, a data protection bill was proposed over a year ago, but not acted upon. Last month, BJP MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar said the joint parliamentary committee would redraw the bill, which would therefore take more time. If we want European protections, we will first need European legislation.
But in the meantime, WhatsApp may have changed its stance on its new privacy policy, but data sharing by Facebook is not going to stop. Switching to Signal, a donation-based nonprofit, makes sense because you don’t get any benefits from tracking. Many of us have used Signal for years, along with alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo, to improve our privacy. But at the same time, don’t be fooled by the false information that your private messages are being read.
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