WhatsApp begins to warn its users of a change in conditions around privacy. The app will now share pretty much all of your personal data with Facebook. If refused, WhatsApp threatens to close your account.
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WhatsApp begins to display a notification to some users around a change in the conditions of use of the application. These changes are generally presented as progress in terms of security and integrity of the service, while offering features in WhatsApp such as Portal and Facebook Pay.
The problem is that when you look more at the changes, you realize that the new conditions above all mean the sharing of almost all your personal data in an automated way with Facebook. We can read in the new conditions: “We collect data about your activity through our Services, such as diagnostic and service-related performance data”.
WhatsApp has new conditions that allow it to collect almost all of your personal data
And to continue: “This data may include information about your activity (including how you use our Services, your preferences in the Services, how you interact with others using our Services (including when you interact with businesses), and time, frequency and duration of your activities and interactions), log and diagnostic files, crashes, sites, and performance logs and reports ”.
Conditions continue: “It also includes information around the date you registered to use our services, features you use such as our messaging, calls, statuses, groups (including group names, images, and description), payment or business features, your profile picture, the data in the About me section, if you are online, when you last used our services and when you updated your About me data me for the last time ”.
The collection does not stop there since “Even if you do not use our location-related features, we use your IP addresses and other data such as geographic codes of phone numbers and your general location (city and country)”. Which is starting to do a lot of data all the same.
Read also: WhatsApp records 1.4 billion calls on New Year’s Eve, an unprecedented record!
Especially compared to competing solutions like Signal (which collects nothing) and the iPhone’s iMessage service which is satisfied with the email address (or phone number) from the search history and a unique identifier. In addition, WhatsApp specifies in its notification that the new conditions take effect on February 8, 2021 and that their acceptance is essential to use the service after this date.
Source: The Hacker News
