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WhatsApp-Facebook Privacy U-Turn Now Being Probed by EU Data Watchdog (techcrunch.com)
European privacy regulators have fired a warning shot to Facebook's WhatsApp and Yahoo, saying they sent letters to the companies expressing concerns about possible violations of the bloc's data-protection rules. From a TechCrunch report: A seismic shift in privacy policy by messaging app WhatsApp this summer, when it said it would begin sharing user data with parent company Facebook including for ad targeting, has now attracted the attention of European's data protection watchdog group, the Article 29 Working Party. The WP29 group wrote to WhatsApp founder Jan Koum yesterday, setting out its concerns about the privacy policy U-turn -- including how the shift was communicated to users. "The Article 29 Working Party (WP29) has serious concerns regarding the manner in which the information relating to the updated Terms of Service and Privacy Policy was provided to users and consequently about the validity of the users' consent,"it writes. "WP29 also questions the effectiveness of control mechanisms offered to users to exercise their rights and the effects that the data sharing will have on people that are not a user of any other service within the Facebook family of companies."
Handle things independently. Set up your own servers with your own PKI, set up your own Groupware, XMPP, CalDav, OwnCloud file sharing. Don't rely on other people to secure your systems for you. Invite the people you know and you trust to use your servers on public servers and then communicate in private on your own servers you host yourself. That is what I do.
My Android devices so not talk to Google's servers, they talk to my home network when it comes to Contacts, Calendaring,Chatting, Tasks, so on and so fourth. I don't permit Windows nodes, or iDevices on my network. If you want privacy, do things yourself.