Just a few days ago, WhatsApp announced new measures, which have been reduced to the company would start sharing usage data with Facebook. It was also a mandatory change, if you didn’t agree to share your data with Facebook, your WhatsApp account would be deleted.
This generated great controversy, probably partly because of the fact that WhatsApp did not explain this process well. Many even believe that Facebook was going to be able to read messages sent by WhatsApp.
Now WhatsApp has announced it will delay this controversial and confusing change in its privacy policy.
Many people said there was a lot of confusion regarding our recent update. Because of the spread of so much misinformation that it causes concern, we want to help people learn the facts and understand our principles.
A break from new WhatsApp policies
This WhatsApp announcement is important, but it is simply a delay in the application of these rules. At first, WhatsApp set February 8 as the deadline to agree to these new privacy policies, and it looks like the next deadline is May 15th.
We will gradually ask users to review the policy at their own pace before the new trading options are activated on May 15.
At this time, WhatsApp wants to clarify how these new policies work. In that statement, they expressed that your messages will be kept private and that their new policy was designed for people who share messages with businesses on WhatsApp.
“WhatsApp was created from a simple idea: what you share with your friends and family stays with you. This means that we will always protect your personal conversations with end-to-end encryption, so that neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can see these private messages. For this reason, we do not keep track of which contacts each person calls or sends messages. We also can’t see the locations you share or share your contacts with Facebook..
With this update, none of that has changed. The update includes new options for people who share messages with businesses on WhatsApp and offers greater transparency on how we collect and use data. Although not all users buy from businesses on WhatsApp nowadays, we believe that more and more people will choose to do so in the future, so it is important that they are familiar with Services. The update does not extend our ability to share data with Facebook“.
We will see if all the controversy that arose at the beginning of the year becomes clearer. WhatsApp is a Facebook business, and we already know that Facebook makes money from our data and advertising. So sooner or later both companies will share your usage data.