WhatsApp has announced a few days ago that it will start sharing some user data (including your phone number) with parent company Facebook.
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“We won’t post or share your WhatsApp number with others, including on Facebook, and we still won’t sell, share, or give your phone number to advertisers. We are looking into this”, Denham said in a statement.
Koum had outlined his approach to privacy in a blog post after the deal with Facebook, drawing on his own experiences of growing up in Ukraine during the Soviet era.
The move, which has angered many users seems to be a shift for the messaging app, which has long vowed to safeguard the privacy of more than one billion users around the world. WhatsApp said it was now part of “the Facebook family of companies”, implying that user data might also be shared across Instagram and Oculus Rift.
WHATSAPP, that thing that people use all the time, has updated its privacy policy for the first time since 2012. However, Facebook has allegedly pledged that it would not interfere with the promise given by the founders of WhatsApp.
We’ve been informed of the changes.
According to Motherboard, there are actually two ways to opt out, depending on whether you’ve blindly accepted the terms already, or not.
“We may use the information we receive from them, and they may use the information we share with them to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customise, support, and market our services and their offerings”, the spokesperson said.
In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for a whopping $21.8 billion.
It means Facebook will have access to phone numbers registered with the instant messaging service and be able to tell when a smartphone user has both apps installed.
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If you’re not impressed by Whatsapp’s decision you can of course (unlike telecom and broadband) stop using the company’s services. Users can go into Settings and in the Account tab, there is an option to deselect the “Share My Account Info” option.
