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

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.

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.

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.