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WhatsApp Ordered To Stop Sharing User Data With Facebook (theverge.com)
France's privacy watchdog CNIL has ordered WhatsApp to stop sharing user data with its parent company Facebook. According to a public notice posted on the French website, WhatsApp has a month to comply with the order. The Verge reports: The query began after WhatsApp added to its terms of service last year that it shares data with Facebook to develop targeted advertising, security measures, and to gather business intelligence. Upon investigating these claims, the CNIL ruled that while WhatsApp's intention of improving security measures was valid, the app's business intelligence reason wasn't as acceptable. After all, WhatsApp never told its users it was collecting data for business intelligence and there's no way to opt out without uninstalling the app. That violates "the fundamental freedoms of users," said the CNIL.
Still makes no sense since the whole point of companies merging is to combine assets, of which customer data is an asset to both the separate facebook and whatsapp companies, and the new combined company under facebook control.
You don't seem to be familiar with European data protection laws. It's your data, not theirs.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Some countries believe customer data is actually owned by the customer. If you want to do something with it, the customer needs to agree.
They frown upon companies who buy other companies for their data and use it for other purposes without consent.
America doesn't care though, they believe companies have more rights than individuals.
Wow. Calling europe corrupt while discussing law that has been passed down that actually benefits citizens and means huge investments and work for all businesses in and acting in europe.
You seem to gloss over the fact that proposals are still requested, debated and ultimately accepted or declined by the european parliament, which is democratically chosen.
European commisionars can actually be removed by the european parliament.
If you're so afraid of lobbying power, why single out the european commission? Look at the executive branch in nearly any country.
The first is that, when WhatsApp launched, it made a big deal about privacy. It was founded by someone who grew up in the USSR and knew precisely how important it was to have a secure way of communicating that wasn't subject to interception. They provided end-to-end encryption and a privacy policy that explicitly prohibited sharing data with other companies or using it for advertising. They had a pretty reasonable business model: the service was free for the first year and then $1/year after that (the hosting costs were nowhere near that - they were using Erlang on FreeBSD on the server side and last I heard [a couple of years before Facebook bought them] could handle around a hundred thousand users per machine). At the very least, this should prevent them from sharing any data from users that signed up on the old T&Cs with Facebook and should require that Facebook provide them with a grace period to migrate to another service before changing the T&Cs.
That might be shaky, but the second point is a lot stronger: the EU antitrust regulator made not sharing data with Facebook an explicit requirement when allowing the purchase to go ahead. Facebook agreed to this before they bought WhatsApp and are now saying 'oh, actually, that's really hard so we don't want to do it'.
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