WhatsApp is not selling your privacy, it's just doing business
WhatsApp is world's most-used messaging app. It is also fairly central to the digital lives of over a billion users.
So, it is quite obvious that if it changes even in the slightest, there is a chance that people are not only going to notice it but also probably freak out.
Even a change in fonts and style is big news for WhatsApp users. Change in its privacy policy, the way it happened last week, is like changing the whole digital world.
WhatsApp has announced a new privacy policy, which will allow it to share some users' details with its parent company, Facebook.
Chances are that WhatsApp data, that includes the phones numbers of users, will be mixed in with the user data Facebook already has, dots will be connected and the more personal ads will concocted.
This is unique. Almost all digital services, and particularly those free ones, use the same model.
Facebook already knows a lot about you and so does Google, which automatically scans your Gmails to offer you more relevant ads and notifications like whether your flight is on time or not. The same goes for Twitter, Instagram, YouTube… you name it.
What is new about the new WhatsApp privacy policy is that it is a big change in its stated stance.
 |
| Strictly business. |
When Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014, here is what Jon Koum, co-founder of the messaging app, said: "You don't have to give us your name and we don't ask for your email address. We don't know your birthday. We don't know your home address. We don't know where you work. We don't know your likes, what you search for on the internet or collect your GPS location. None of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp, and we really have no plans to change that."
This is all accurate. But Facebook has all this data and once numbers from WhatsApp connect to this data, it's easy to create the profiles of users.
WhatsApp is still committed not to bring banner ads into the app (good) but do have some plans to monetise the service.
It's not nice from the perspective of privacy (for now you can also opt out of new privacy policy) but it's business as usual.
Other services, including Facebook and Gmail that are also used by over a billion people, already have all this data.
You can't reasonably expect WhatsApp, a free service, not to use the similar methods to monetise itself and pay its staff.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)