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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."
that I do not alter it further.
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
Indeed. Including the magic clause "[company] may rewrite the terms of service from time to time, and it's the users responsibility to check the website periodically [...]" solves all future problems.
I always believed that no court in the universe will find this valid. Are you sure it's allowed in the US?
Serious businesses don't change the active contracts with their clients whenever they feel like it, without first discussing it with the rest of the affected parties in order to reach an agreement. This should be the normal practice for the ToS as well.
Not true. But you're entitled to your dumb opinion. The problem is most of these tech companies own an illegal monopoly on markets and get away with it so you're right. But your wrong that if a company changes TOS on you, if they impede your freedoms, income, etc you not only have a legal claim but your also entitled to damage, its why we call it the "justice system".
Hope a paid alternative to WhatsApp emerges.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I have my own justice system.
I read this story and then instantly uninstalled the app.
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'
For all intents and purposes, Facebook has a monopoly on the social internet market in that there is no other social network any one person can get all their friends and family onto.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
> As far as the social, chatty apps, I really doubt that WhatsApp has anywhere close to a monopoly.
It certainly has in large parts of Europe and South America. It was the first usable replacement of sms, which was kept very expensive in some countries by the telco's. In The Netherlands, all others are insignificant compared to Whatsapp. There, the largest telco wanted at one time to introduce a special more expensive data contract that allowed one to use Whatsapp and the like (it would be blocked on other contracts, forcing them to use expensive sms). It resulted in having strict net neutrality laws getting passed very quickly after the public outcry.
But did you get to delete all your personal info like phone number and chats you have made? I don't think deleting a program changes any data they collected.
Jack of all trades,master of none
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.