WhatsApp To Share Some Data With Facebook (bloomberg.com)

Two years ago when Facebook bought WhatsApp, the instant messaging client said that the deal would not affect the digital privacy of its users. Things are changing now, WhatsApp said Thursday. The Facebook-owned app will share with the company some member information, as well as some analytics data of its users. Bloomberg reports: WhatsApp announced a change to its privacy policy today that allows businesses to communicate with users. The messages could include appointment reminders, delivery and shipping notifications or marketing material, the company said in its revised terms of service. In a blog post, WhatsApp said it will be testing these business features over the coming months. The strategy is an important step for Facebook as it attempts to make money from its most expensive acquisition. In addition to the messages from businesses, WhatsApp said it would begin sharing more information about its users with the "Facebook family." The data, including a person's phone number, could be used to better targets ads when browsing Facebook or Instagram, WhatsApp said.

Comments

"Some" data?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try all the data. Privacy is dead, and has been for quite a while.

Re:"Some" data?

[The Real Dr John]

This is why mergers and buyouts are such a problem. People need to start boycotting companies that do this kind of thing. Also time to bring back anti-trust laws and break up any companies that are "too big to fail".

Re:"Some" data?

[Anonymous Coward]

The majority of my friends aren't geeks. What really weirds me out is that they say they wouldn't tell their friends everything about their private lives, but if I tell them that IT admins with access to their entire online life are just people like me, their eyes glaze over.

I try to explain it in simple terms: You don't want me to know this private stuff about you - but in my professional capacity I have access to all this information about you. There are numerous examples of governments with political agendas or individuals with personal agendas abusing access to private information. You are relying on the fact that you will never knowingly or unknowingly get on the wrong side of anybody in that position.

But still, blank.

I don't know how to explain it to people. I mean when I was a kid life was simpler, as actions were less likely to have consequences: I'd just go into l33t hax0r mode and obtain files from their machine / school computer account and then show them what I can do. They'd feel embarrassed and I'd teach them a bit about basic security. But as an adult and in this "post-9/11" world of fear, I wouldn't dare take that approach.

I just don't know what to do.

Re:"Some" data?

[TheRaven64]

It was always a stupid-sounding idea to use Whatsapp (I mean that as a totally independent fact, relative to whether or not Whatsapp was actually any good or not). From the very beginning, it was just someone's proprietary app that used an undocumented protocol. Nobody who is trying to do things right, is going to use anything like that.

Of the proprietary messengers, WhatsApp was the least bad. It was founded by people who grew up in the Soviet Union and left with an abiding hatred of surveillance, had a very strong privacy policy, and did end-to-end encryption. Also, using Erlang on FreeBSD, it had a lot of geek cred. Unfortunately, when Facebook bought it there wasn't much chance of it keeping the philosophy of the founders. On the plus side, they did donate $1m from the sale price to the FreeBSD Foundation.

I used to be a big advocate of XMPP, but it's largely been mismanaged into the ground by a lack of leadership in the standards body and a lack of decent reference implementations for the client side. Tox seems like the best bet at the moment for producing something that is both secure and open, yet with implementations that you can give to normal humans and get them connected.

Re:"Some" data?

[jenningsthecat]

...People need to start boycotting companies that do this kind of thing.

The vast majority of people don't care and don't want to know. They've been trained from birth to not be analytical and to follow the herd. For those in power, making "the people" feel powerless is good; making them feel that everything is OK and that they have neither need nor desire for power, is even better.

Also time to bring back anti-trust laws and break up any companies that are "too big to fail".

To a large extent, laws are effectively written and enforced by the companies that are "too big to fail" and their friends. Unless and until corporate hegemony is upended or destroyed this kind of abuse will continue to grow.

Re:"Some" data?

[The Real Dr John]

Sad but true. But that doesn't mean people shouldn't try and make things better. It's not like these things are unavoidable natural disasters, they are the results of plotting, greedy sociopaths. We can fight back, and that, thankfully, seems to be a recurring theme in this election cycle.

Re:"Some" data?

[jenningsthecat]

The majority of my friends aren't geeks. What really weirds me out is that they say they wouldn't tell their friends everything about their private lives, but if I tell them that IT admins with access to their entire online life are just people like me, their eyes glaze over.

I try to explain it in simple terms: You don't want me to know this private stuff about you - but in my professional capacity I have access to all this information about you. There are numerous examples of governments with political agendas or individuals with personal agendas abusing access to private information. You are relying on the fact that you will never knowingly or unknowingly get on the wrong side of anybody in that position.

But still, blank.

I have the same problem. I think it has something to do with 'out of sight, out of mind'. If our friends don't know, will likely never meet, and don't know about the people who have access to their private data, then it's easy for them to keep their heads in the sand. It's comfortable, it requires no additional effort, and the threat of having to change their daily routines and upset their social structures feels more imminent and more dangerous than the (in their minds still abstract) threat of having their private info revealed to the world. I think this is partly just a human trait, and partly the result of indoctrination in public schools in an industrial society.

I don't know how to explain it to people. I mean when I was a kid life was simpler, as actions were less likely to have consequences: I'd just go into l33t hax0r mode and obtain files from their machine / school computer account and then show them what I can do...

I just don't know what to do.

I've never been remotely close to being a hacker, never mind 'l33t'. But I also don't know what to do. I offer my friends help with making their online activities safer and more private, and all I hear are crickets. And I'm not talking about ditching Facebook, Twitter, and the like - I'm just talking about ad blockers, NoScript, and a basic education about the types of places and behaviours to avoid. If they won't even do the Internet equivalent of asking a partner about STD's before having sex, how the hell would they ever come to terms with the fact that companies like Facebook are just using them and plundering their very lives for profit? Sometimes I feel like Neo in The Matrix.

Re:"Some" data?

[wvmarle]

WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted - or so they say, at least. I'm by no means an expert so I take their word for it, including it being unbreakable and WhatsApp not being able to read my messages while in transit and so.

This means the only data WhatsApp could possibly have from me, other than my phone number and my contact list, is encrypted messages (something they can't search for clues about my interests - yes I'm conveniently ignoring the time before they encrypted it all), and how many messages I exchange with whom, and the size of those messages and maybe info about attachments (type and size).

Where is the value in such data when it comes to targeting ads?

Repeat after me...

[HungryMonkey]

If you're not paying for the product, you are the product. Surprise, surprise.

Re:Repeat after me...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's open source. You're not the product, you're the quality control department.

Repeat after me

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing Facebook says can be trusted. Same goes for any company whose product or service you aren't paying for, and lots of the ones you do pay for, too.

Two years ago when Facebook bought WhatsApp, the instant messaging client said that the deal would not affect the digital privacy of its users. Things are changing now

Things always change. Companies always break their promises, er, "update their terms of service." Look at how many statements Microsoft made about Windows 10 that turned out to be utterly false, for example. Welcome to America, the show where the rules are made up and promises don't matter.

Re:Surprise?

[TheRaven64]

Yes, probably a lot of people. Before it was purchased, WhatsApp had a very strong privacy guarantee and made a marketing point of the fact that their protocol's end-to-end encryption meant that they couldn't spy on you even if they wanted to. When Facebook bought them, they announced that there would be no changes to this guarantee.

Re: Surprise?

[Lab Rat Jason]

GCHQ and NSA got in trouble???? [citation needed]

Re:How to delete your phone number from facebook

[sdinfoserv]

It's even more insidious that that....FB creates "dark profiles", these are profiles on people who don't even have or want accounts. For example you go to visit your 80 year old mother who's not on FB, but you mention the fact that you're going to visit in a post.... they create her as a "dark profile". every time someone mentions her in a post, they continue to data mine and aggregate attributes... age, geographic location, income, relatives, what she likes, gifts given,... etc. You post a selfie with her while visiting - now they have facial recognition to add to the profile - all for marketing purposes and clearly without her consent.

Who didn't see this coming?

[alispguru]

I did, when we talked about WhatsApp back in 2014.