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https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/06/whatsapp-share-your-data-with-facebook/
WhatsApp to share your data with Facebook as condition of use
Upcoming changes to the messaging app’s privacy policy remove the opt-out option, as spotted by XDA-Developers.
WhatsApp users are receiving an in-app notice today regarding the service’s new terms and privacy policy. The notice, as you can see in the attached screenshot, talks about three key updates that affect how WhatsApp processes your data, how businesses can use Facebook hosted services to store and manage their WhatsApp chats, and how WhatsApp will soon partner with Facebook to offer deeper integrations across all of the latter’s products. It further reveals that these changes will go into effect on February 8th, and users will have no choice but to accept these changes if they wish to continue using WhatsApp.
Among other things, your data will now be used to show personalized ads.
Improving their services and your experiences using them, such as making suggestions for you (for example, of friends or group connections, or of interesting content), personalizing features and content, helping you complete purchases and transactions, and showing relevant offers and ads across the Facebook Company Products.
You can read the full details here.
WhatsApp does, however, use end-to-end encryption for all messaging – text, voice, and video – so cannot see or use the content of your messages or calls. Update: The new privacy policy also doesn’t apply in Europe due to stronger privacy legislation there.
The news follows a piece highlighting the vastly different amounts of information linked to user identities by four messaging apps: Signal, iMessage, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. This was revealed by Apple requiring apps to disclose the personal data they collect, and specify the ways in which it is used.
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No worry for me. I use WA to communicate with a small handful of Europeans and Latin Americans.
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How does end to end encryption and personalized ads go together?
Personalization based on your WhatsApp metadata (profile data, who your contacts are) rather than the content of your messages/calls.
I am glad I never let WhapsApp access to my Contacts. WhatsApp has access to my photos on my phone but I doubt WhatsApp will try to surreptitiously upload my photos to Facebook. The file sizes are too big and it would be too obvious and too easy to detect. (And I don’t keep many photos in my phone anyway.)
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Personalization based on your WhatsApp metadata (profile data, who your contacts are) rather than the content of your messages/calls.
But isn't that rather meagre for personalization? How would you use that metadata for personalization?
One thing I could imagine is that the algorithm to select ads runs on the phone. Or alternatively, the phone transmits an ad-relevant summary of the conversation to the server (which would partially break the confidentiality).
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I have a few WhatsApp people, but in Thailand, LINE seems to be much bigger.
(Actually LINE is pretty big all through Asia)
