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Facebook's WhatsApp Data Gambit Faces Federal Privacy Complaint (vice.com)
Sam Gustin, writing for Motherboard: Facebook's decision to begin harvesting data from its popular WhatsApp messaging service provoked a social media uproar on Thursday, and prompted leading privacy advocates to prepare a federal complaint accusing the tech titan of violating US law. On Thursday morning, WhatsApp, which for years has dined out on its reputation for privacy and security, announced that it would begin sharing user phone numbers with its Menlo Park-based parent company in an effort "to improve your Facebook ads and products experiences." Consumer privacy advocates denounced the move as a betrayal of WhatsApp's one billion users -- users who had been assured by the two companies that "nothing would change" about the messaging service's privacy practices after Facebook snapped up the startup for a whopping $19 billion in 2014. "WhatsApp users should be shocked and upset," Claire Gartland, Consumer Protection Counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a leading US consumer advocacy group, told Motherboard. "WhatsApp obtained one billion users by promising that it would protect user privacy. Both Facebook and WhatsApp made very public promises that the companies would maintain a separation. Those were the key selling points of the deal."
And the TOS certainly said that this could change at any time. In the US it's legal to be shady this way. Maybe it shouldn't be, but it's allowed. And I don't think there was much in terms of regulatory review of this deal where any explicit promises were made to government entities. I may be wrong here, but if I go double check I won't get a first post.
that I do not alter it further.
Facebook altered its Terms of Service to the detriment of it's user base in order to make more money. That's not news, it's a day at the office.
They both had their fingers crossed when they made the privacy promises. But seriously, anyone who thought FB wasn't going to harvest data at some point from a company they bought was seriously mistaken.
Some people saw this coming when WhatsApp was sold.
How do you think Facebook where going to recoup the money? By turning their users into a product they can sell of course.
Surprised?
You shouldn't be, this how it works with social platforms; you aren't a user - you are a product.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
just switch to linux!
Be or ben't
Perhaps Facebook can tell us what Better User Experience they can create by mining the phone number of private, encrypted text messages?
I've found that by replacing WhatsApp with Signal I have a far better user experience, namely my private communications remain private. I've already removed Facebook from my phone, I can use my laptop for the occasional checking up on what family and friends are doing
Hope a paid alternative to WhatsApp emerges.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If your policy violated the US privacy policies as a company that is that big, you know you fucked up.
Or perhaps it is just greedy politicians that want extra money to change the law.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Their alleged claim of wanting to "improve your Facebook ads and products experiences" is pure bullshit... while this might be obvious to anyone who knows about Facebook's track record, the claim does not even withstand remotely objective scrutiny.
Assume just for a moment that their claim of wanting to improve the user experience were true....Consider that Whatsapp has no information about the content of any messages sent between users, so any content within the messages that are sent cannot be harvested to generate any kind of targeted advertising, the *only* thing that they have are names and phone numbers, and who is sending messages to whom, with no basis for understanding why beyond anything that might have been communicated out of band directly to Whatsapp. So since Whatsapp has no information about its users that can be used to actually generate any kind of "improved advertising experience" for its users, the assumption that this is what they actually are trying to do cannot possibly be correct.
There is nothing remotely tenable I can see about the notion that this could even somehow theoretically create an improved experience for the end user, and Facebook's claims that it would do so would seem to be wholly transparent lies.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Centralized systems will always be ripe for abuse, it isn't question of IF, but WHEN your data will be harvested and profiled.
The only feasible solution to combat this is distributed peer to peer implementations. Maybe good people at TOR project could take a short break from trying to save the world and build a privacy-conscious chat app for the masses?
Well, if the federal government forced on messaging systems a requirement to interchange with other messaging systems, then some of this may be reduced? Back in the 20th century this was done for the voice-landline networks and in many ways has resulted in the only non-fragmented, multi-vendor, communications system we have today. GSMA was formed because of the fragmentation of the analogue cellular networks at the time, but inherited to a certain extent the regulatory requirements to interconnect.
XMPP held a certain promise there, but because there was no regulatory requirement, businesses just said 'screw this and lets keep our little nation states isolated for more money'. We saw this happen with both Facebook and Google. Other systems just made it difficult for apps such as Pidgin to talk to their systems from the start.
Myself I would welcome any move to interconnect, since I have 5 messaging apps just to be able to keep up with friends, since the favoured platform varies with region. SMS isn't the best, but most friends still have a phone number.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
+1 Mod this up please.
Should read the fable, "Scorpion and the Frog".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And why not? Facebook exists to make money.
you and many others may think so. maybe you are right.
but maybe, just maybe, its all a scam and totally owned by the government as a way to get around *direct* spying on citizens.
google, MS and even apple included. to be a big player in the US, you have to follow some rules, especially the ones you will never read about or be able to point to in print.
we're in a post-snowden understanding of things; and yet there is still so much more that we don't know about the reality of our world. power brokers run up and down at all levels and to believe that this is a 'happy, shiney world' is just so last-century.
hardware vendors (intel, amd, etc) also have to play along. intel's ME crap is yet another spying tech that regular people are not allowed to know much about.
we do live in a mixed world. lots of good people who have good intentions. but equally, lots of people much like the ones who 'like to see the world burn' and that includes bad guys on 'both sides' of some imaginary line.
I don't believe for a second that the huge players have not bent over and done whatever the US government wanted, in order to have an 'easier way' to continue to make their billions and live essentially tax-free and with full protection and support of the government. such a cozy relationship. but you and I don't get to play; its only for the big corps and those in the elite groups.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Public assurances, do not a legal action make.
A few months ago, I wanted to try whatsapp on Android. The app asked me for permission to dig into my contacts, which I refused.
You can't do much without that permission: impossible to start a conversation, impossible to input a name for someone that started a conversation with you, impossible to add contacts by hand in whatsapp; it have to be in the phone contact's list.
When I asked their support about this, they kindly redirected me to their FAQs, explained to me that they use phone numbers to identify contact, that it was for my convenience that this was required, etc. I even got a full rundown of Android permissions required by whatsapp. No option to ever start a conversation by typing a phone number ever came on the table.
Best part was this: "We value your privacy and we do not sell your personal information to anyone.". I suppose technically it's not sold "to anyone", but still. Trust is the most important thing you need in this business; if you require from people to give you all their infos, then pull jokes like that, you might as well just stop doing business.
https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/e...
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
If Facebook went to the original WhatsApp business model ($1/year) and swore under penalty of dissolution that they wouldn't sell, disburse, or look at user data, I'd sign right up. They'd make a billion dollars a year! Who has access to the internet to the degree that FB is useful to them and can't afford a dollar a year?
But instead we have all this murkiness with adverts and data vending and TOS and outright lies.
And it would take 19 years to recover the purchase cost.
--
All men having power ought to be mistrusted -- James Madison
I'm not talking about WhatsApp. I'm talking Facebook proper.
Since I don't use Facebook, my number should be irrelevant to them to serve me advertisement in their platform. Furthermore, I use the anti-social plugins for browsing so they don't get my browsing history either.
If this really bothers you, Signal is a perfectly good alternative to WhatsApp, which is completely open source and with almost identical functionality. Another surprisingly good and also open source alternative is Wire, which doesn't rely on phone numbers, and it's completely multiplatform.
If you can't vote with your dollars, vote with your feet.
Then you're either not very smart, or you've been paying ZERO attention for the last decade or two.
Facebook didn't buy Whatsapp because they like their logo - they bought them to monetize them somehow.
The way Facebook USUALLY monetizes things is to learn as much about you as possible, and then sell ads targeting you.
It's hardly surprising that Facebook would start to try to make use of any data that Whatsapp has. And remember that Facebook acts as though it things privacy is a thing for other people - not for you.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.