If you opened WhatsApp in the past couple of days, you saw a ‘New Terms and Conditions’ pop-up page in your app. Like many others, you probably didn’t give it another thought and shut the pop up to look at your messages. However WhatsApp’s new terms and conditions are significant in the way that they collect and share data. This also marks a change in the way that personal user information is shared by the app and greater Facebook integration. There could be privacy implications of this as well as concerns about interacting with businesses via WhatsApp.
This popped up on all our screens. If you press AGREE, you continue as before. And if you don’t agree by 8th February, you can no longer use WhatsApp’s services.
Most of the time, privacy policies are just something that exist; with little relevance to our lives.
Few if any bother to read those tedious terms couched in leaden legalese; most of us simply click ‘agree’.
WhatsApp’s new terms and conditions give them far wider powers to collect our info – they include new terms that were not part of the deal earlier.
WhatsApp says this is for our safety and security – not quite, as Sanket explains in this video.
There are privacy concerns that people have – there will still be end to end encryption, but the data gathering and sharing is definitely concerning.
You may as well be using the other if you're using one, it seems.
For all their assurances, it doesn’t seem as though WhatsApp and Mark Zuckerberg are particularly concerned with protecting our privacy or restricting use of our personal info.
WhatsApp and its parent company Facebook as well as the Messenger app collect a lot of our data.
Via this ‘update’ WhatsApp is basically telling us that they will do whatever the f**k they want to do. They are telling us that there is nothing we can do if we want to continue using the app that has become so much a part of our lives.
And by that we of course mean the Zuckerberg.
It is likely that our info will be used mainly for targeted advertising so that we end up buying more stuff.
However, there is no way to control our info being sold to the highest bidder – whether that be a manufacturer, politician, party or other shadowy entity.
If you’ve watched The Social Dilemma you have some understanding of how social media works and how yours and my information is the most valuable of resources.
The thing is that even if you delete the app and stop using it today, your data already collected by the company will not be deleted.
Some have or say they will uninstall the app because they don’t agree with WhatsApp’s new privacy and security terms. However, it seems clear that the company will still have and may use whatever data they have collected hitherto.
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