A new announcement regarding WhatsApp is making rounds especially on social media. Everybody is hearing that WhatsApp is changing its privacy policies. This news stated that users have time till February 9, to accept these new conditions, and WhatsApp has pointed to those users may not be able to access their WhatsApp accounts if they do not accept the new terms and agreements.
This latest update has caused a lot of fear over the new privacy policy and raised a lot of speculations, particularly with respect to data sharing with its parent company Facebook. According to Facebook-owned WhatsApp’s new policy, it may share your information with its family of companies to help, maintain and integrate their activities and get better services. Whatever information WhatsApp automatically collects from the users will be shared with Facebook. This includes mobile phone number and basic information users give when they create a WhatsApp account. It also collects and shares user activity, how often you use WhatsApp, features you use, your profile photo, your status and ‘about’ information, as per the new policy. The new update also collects device-level information like what device you use, your mobile network, IP address, among others. It also collects and uses precise location information from your device, but with your consent.
Soon after announcing its new policy, WhatsApp faced a lot of backlash by the users. Amid the ongoing controversy over the new policy, Signal and Telegram have emerged as better reliable and secure modes of communication than WhatsApp. Signal, the platform, which supports all the features of WhatsApp, can be downloaded from the App Store and Google’s Play Store. Moreover, Signal has a clear standing on its privacy policy. The platform has included multiple features to support privacy such as view-once media, Signal PIN, and more. It is an independent platform, which means that development is supported purely by donations from users. More than 100,000 users installed Signal across the app stores of Apple and Google in the last three days, while Telegram picked up nearly 2.2 million downloads, according to data analytics firm Sensor Tower.
WhatsApp has given clarification
In a new blogpost the company said, “With some of the rumors going around, we want to answer some of the common questions we have received. We go to great lengths to build WhatsApp in a way that helps people communicate privately.” The post adds that the policy “does not affect the privacy of your messages with friends or family in any way.”
It adds that the update “provides further transparency about how we collect and use data.” It further said, “it can’t read your messages or hear your calls, and neither can Facebook.” It reiterates that WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted adding that they “will never weaken this security and we clearly label each chat so you know our commitment.” WhatsApp said it doesn’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging or calling. It says “we believe that keeping these records for two billion users would be both a privacy and security risk and we don’t do it.”
by: Abeer Arshad
Tags: whatsapp app, WhatsApp for business, whatsapp gb download, whatsapp status, whatsapp web
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