What’s happening to WhatsApp? You have probably heard that at the end of August some changes have been done affecting the privacy policies of our favourite mobile messaging application, so let’s see together what happened. By now, we all know that WhasApp was founded by Jan Kuom and Brian Acton in 2009, and acquired by Facebook in 2014.
Since then the growth of the app never stopped, and now WhatsApp is the most successful instant messaging app in the world, with one billion monthly active users (not to mention the voice calls: only in June they were over one million). Well, on the 25th of August the Company announced its decision to change WhatsApp’s privacy policies, so now you will share some of your personal account data with Facebook.The announcement was given through a blog post that said: “Today, we’re updating WhatsApp’s terms and privacy policy for the first time in four years, as part of our plans to test ways for people to communicate with businesses in the months ahead,”.
The message also explained that “The updated documents also reflect that we’ve joined Facebook and that we’ve recently rolled out many new features, like end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp Calling, and messaging tools like WhatsApp for web and desktop. … But by coordinating more with Facebook, we’ll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp. And by connecting your phone number with Facebook’s systems, Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them.”
While many users are quite disappointed about this change, others have no problem at all and consider it quite obvious since WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. But luckily there is a solution. If you don’t want to share your phone number with Facebook you can easily opt out of this. Let’s see how you can do it. When users launch WhatsApp, a message will be displayed on their screen related to the new Terms and Conditions. From this message we can choose between three options: Agree, Disagree or Read More.
If you don’t want to accept these new conditions just turn off the toggle that suggests to share your mobile number with Facebook. See? Couldn’t be easier. What happens now? And why WhatsApp has introduced this change? As explained by Neurogadget, the purpose of the information sharing between Facebook and WhatsApp is to create better targeted ads which will soon invade WhatsApp as well and to create more efficient solutions for the advertiser and the consumer.
As a consequence, if you opt out of this, you will not receive purchase suggestions from your contacts on Facebook, and you will not receive ads related to your lifestyle as well. So, have you already decided what to do?