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."

Comments

Pray

[Anonymous Coward]

that I do not alter it further.

No problem here

[stevez67]

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.

Re:No problem here

[JaredOfEuropa]

It would be nice to set some legal ground rules for EULAs. Such as: they cannot be changed without prior notice, the text should fit on 4 A4-sized sheets in 12 point font, and you can only use the words in this dictionary ("the ten-hundred most used words").

Last year I got a mortgage for a commercial property, and was pleasantly surprised by the terms and conditions: written in very plain and succinct language, and especially lacking in those unbelievable run-on sentences found in regular legalese. It is possible to write agreements that can actually be read and understood. Time to make that a requirement if companies want to have them legally enforced.

Surprise!?

[Knightman]

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.

mandatory

[sirber]

just switch to linux!

Re:Those were marketing claims

[Dex Hex]

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?

I paid for WahtsApp

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It had a one year free use, and 1$ a year, 5$ for five year price back when it started. I am a paid user of WhatsApp. It has no right to share my phone number with facebook. I don't even have a face book page, I have taken steps to stay away from Linkedin and Facebook.

Hope a paid alternative to WhatsApp emerges.

WTF are they proposing to improve exactly?

[mark-t]

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.

Re:WTF are they proposing to improve exactly?

[Sloppy]

When they talk about the "user experience" they mean someone who is buying ads, not the person who is posting "Look what Hillary Trump said last night" every day. Think in terms of Facebook's customers.

Knowing who is talking to whom is an important part of Facebook's marketing. Look at how Facebook targets and consider item #19 in that article. It's not just about who you are, it's about who you know. Whether you think this is a good idea for Facebook or not, it is what they do.

User A and user B are friends in real life, use Whatsapp, and have Facebook accounts -- but they're not "friends" on Facebook (maybe they only use Facebook for work, or something like that). (Or maybe they don't have Facebook accounts, but Facebook has profiles on them gathered by "like" buttons, and has some way to deliver ads to at least one of them.) They communicate with each other using Whatsapp. This lets Facebook connect the two profiles, even though within Facebook alone, they are unconnected. The result: Now user A can see shopping ads for user B's upcoming birthday.

The advertiser has a good products experience.

Re: Those were marketing claims

[Stan92057]

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.