Concerns and Clarifications on WhatsApp privacy policy, which lost them millions of customers

What is that update causing this buzz?

With WhatsApp’s new update in the first week of Jan 2021, its users across the globe started receiving an in-app notice on its update to terms and privacy policy. The notification read, “By tapping Agree, you accept the new terms and privacy policy, which take effect on 8 February 2021. After this date, you’ll need to accept these updates to continue using WhatsApp”. i.e., users have no choice but to accept these new policies and terms if they want to continue using WhatsApp. It captures the below list as key updates:

• how WhatsApp processes user data
• how businesses can use Facebook hosted services to store and manage their WhatsApp chats
• how the company partners with Facebook to offer integrations across the Facebook Company Product.

What are the concerns?

1. WhatsApp will store and share users’ data with other Facebook company products to provide better service across all its products.
2. More than that — European users get different terms from the rest of the world users as they have to abide by GDPR.
3. People thought WhatsApp being the most secure place, and its End-to-End encryption in all the chats and calls are thrown away by this move to mandate all its users to accept the terms.
4. Within weeks millions of WhatsApp users migrated other secure message apps like Telegram and Signal (Over the first three weeks of January, Signal has gained 7.5 million users globally, according to figures shared by the UK parliament’s home affairs committee, and Telegram has gained 25 million. Ref: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/24/whatsapp-loses-millions-of-users-after-terms-update)

WhatsApp response:

WhatsApp recently added a FAQs post and ran a privacy clarification campaign to address the concerns/rumors on the update in terms. Below are few statements taken directly from WhatsApp campaign.

“With some of the rumors going around, we want to answer some of the common questions we have received. We go to great lengths to build WhatsApp in a way that helps people communicate privately. The updated policy does not affect the privacy of your messages with friends or family in any way.”https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?type=text%2Fhtml&key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&schema=twitter&url=https%3A//twitter.com/WhatsApp/status/1348839600333049857%3Fref_src%3Dtwsrc%255Etfw%257Ctwcamp%255Etweetembed%257Ctwterm%255E1348839600333049857%257Ctwgr%255E%26ref_url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.ndtv.com%252Findia-news%252Fwhatsapp-clarifies-again-on-privacy-policy-amid-row-update-doesnt-affect-privacy-of-messages-with-friends-or-family-2351077&image=WhatsApp tweet on rumors on new terms updates

Key takeaways:

WhatsApp clearly said that the change in its recently revised policy “does not affect the privacy of messages with friends or family. Instead, this update includes changes related to messaging a business on WhatsApp”. It further clarifies how user data is used in WhatsApp.

Conclusion:

Even this could be viewed as an execution problem of WhatsApp – something as a poorly explained update to its terms and privacy policies. It exposed the possibility of what a company like WhatsApp/Facebook can do with user data. Internet giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon has tons of user data, and I leave it here. Data privacy is a serious issue, and we need to have more strict laws/regulations like GDPR to protect users’ interests.

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