WhatsApp has now officially announced that the controversial and, above all, confusing change to its privacy policy will be postponed.
A new WhatsApp data protection policy was supposed to come into force in February. This news has caused a lot of discussion worldwide. Now the Facebook subsidiary wants to postpone the changes by three months. This is what the company's own blog post says:
We've heard from many people that our recent updates have caused a lot of confusion. There's a lot of misinformation floating around that's causing concern. We want to help everyone understand our principles and the facts.
Data protection guidelines: Changes to come into force in May
As a reminder, in 2016 WhatsApp started sharing data with Facebook by default but users still had the option to opt out. Last week, a report referring to changes of the privacy policy, that WhatsApp would start sharing user data with Facebook on February 8th without giving users a choice - except for EU citizens. WhatsApp has since tried to shed light on the matter and has explained that these changes affect companies and not individual users. But the confusion remained. Now writes the company:
We've now decided to push back the date when users are asked to read and accept the Terms of Service. No accounts will be suspended or deleted on February 8. We'll also be doing a lot more to clear up the misinformation around how privacy and security works on WhatsApp. We'll then gradually ask our users to read the policy on their own time before the new options for communicating with businesses become available on May 15.
WhatsApp highlights end-to-end encryption
The Facebook subsidiary once again emphasized the privacy and security of users. It states:
WhatsApp was born from a simple idea: what you share with your friends and family stays private between you. That means we'll always protect your personal chats with end-to-end encryption, meaning neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can read those private messages. For the same reason, we don't keep logs of who everyone messages or calls. We also can't see your shared location, and we don't share your contacts with Facebook.
These updates don't change that. Instead, these updates include new options for how people can use WhatsApp to message businesses. These changes increase transparency about how we collect and use data. While not many people are buying from businesses using WhatsApp today, we believe more will choose to do so in the future, so it's important to share information about these services. These updates don't give us any additional permissions to share data with Facebook.
Because of all this confusion surrounding the issue, competitors like Signal and Telegram have benefited greatly. Now it remains to be seen what efforts WhatsApp will make to provide more clarity. (Photo by Denys Prykhodov / Bigstockphoto)
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