Social media giant Facebook acquired WhatsApp back in 2014, and it slowly changed the way the platform accessed user data. And now Facebook is displaying a “take it or leave it” stance to the WhatsApp users with the newly updated privacy policy.
Earlier this week, users from around the world started seeing a popup notification regarding privacy policy and terms of service update on their WhatsApp, and most users had no idea what this was all about. With this latest update, the social networking company has expanded the way WhatsApp will share its user data with other Facebook-owned platforms and third-party apps as well.
And that’s not all. This update also arrived with the condition that if a person denies sharing their data with the company, i.e., Facebook, they need to leave the messaging platform.
These new terms of service will come into effect next month, on 8th February.
What Does This New Privacy Policy Put At Stake?
WhatsApp will continue to hold on to data, including the information of whether the user is online or not, frequency as well as the duration of their online activities, and group names and icons and status.
Apart from this, the messaging platform will also accumulate data from the new payment feature, which includes processing method, shipment data, and transactions. Beyond this, the company will also gather and share information such as location, operating system, browser details, device model, and battery level.
A Privacy Label U-Turn
Last year, back in July, WhatsApp provided its users with the option to “opt out” on sharing their usage data. In its earlier privacy policy version, the company said that the existing WhatsApp users could choose not to share their account information with Facebook to enhance Facebook ads and product experiences. The notification also further added that users who accept the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use will still have an additional 30-day period to make this decision.
However, coming back to this new update, the platform has wholly deleted this clause making it compulsory for the WhatsApp users to fetch and share their account information with other Facebook-owned as well as third-party apps.
Impact of This New Update on Users
Back in 2009, WhatsApp was launched as a free, cross-messaging platform service. And in just four years of its existence, the platform successfully earned more than 400 million active users per month. After its massive success in the social media world, in 2014, the social networking giant Facebook bought WhatsApp. Slowly Facebook entirely changed how WhatsApp accessed its users’ data. With this latest privacy policy and terms of use update, Facebook is now displaying a “take it or leave it” stance to the WhatsApp users.
These new terms of use will allow Facebook-owned and other related third-party apps to abuse and cash in on the user data, which includes users’ personal data, violating people’s privacy for their commercial gain.
WhatsApp’s new privacy policy is short of clarity, and it fails to clear up the way data from Facebook, Instagram, and now WhatsApp is being merged and to whom this data is being made available by the social networking company.
Conclusion
An investigation will most probably help people to find all the answers to their questions with regard to this new data collection policy of Facebook. However, the social networking company hasn’t responded to the questions of the joint parliamentary committee in regard to its practices, which makes it more challenging to determine where this data sharing problem currently stands. Moreover, the absence of a data protection committee in India intensifies this problem all the more so.