Ali Hasan
WhatsApp delays changes by 3 months
The people have spoken and this forced WhatsApp to delay their controversial privacy policy until May 15, 2021. As soon as WhatsApp announced that they will be sharing the data of the users with Facebook, they received a lot of backlash.
After weeks of criticism, WhatsApp finally announced a delay in the introduction of a new privacy policy. WhatsApp on Friday said that the update was focused on allowing users to message with businesses, and that the update does not affect personal conversations, which will continue to have end-to-end encryption.
“We’ve heard from so many people how much confusion there is around our recent update,” the company wrote on Friday in a blog post. “There’s been a lot of misinformation causing concern and we want to help everyone understand our principles and the facts,” post added.
“WhatsApp was built on a simple idea: what you share with your friends and family stays between you. This means we will always protect your personal conversations with end-to-end encryption, so that neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can see these private messages. It’s why we don’t keep logs of who everyone’s messaging or calling. We also can’t see your shared location and we don’t share your contacts with Facebook,” it said in a blog post, and added: “This update does not expand our ability to share data with Facebook.”
You might think that WhatsApp isn’t sharing any new data with Facebook or there aren’t expanding their ability but the truth is that WhatsApp already shares a lot of information with Facebook. When it said that the update doesn’t expand the ability to share data with Facebook, that’s because it has been sharing your data for years now.
But many believe it’s already too late to convince them any further as millions of people have moved onto either Telegram or Signal, which are the 2 apps that don’t share your data with any third party database.
The response for using a new messenger app was so strong that around 25 million new users signed up for Telegram in just 3 days, and Signal became the number 1 app in its category in many parts of the world, bringing on so many people that it couldn’t keep up with the demand, and took nearly 2 days to resolve a major outage that started on Friday.
The fact that we all need a global data protection act to safeguard our data is becoming more and more evident. In India, the government has been discussing a Data Protection Law for several years — after many false starts, a Data Protection Bill was proposed more than a year ago, but has not proceeded further.
Last month, BJP MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar said the joint parliamentary committee is going to redraw the bill, so this will take more time. If we want European protections, we will need European legislation first.
But in the meanwhile, WhatsApp might have changed its stance on its new privacy policy, but the data being shared by Facebook is not going to stop. Switching to Signal, a non-profit run on donations makes sense as it gets no benefit by tracking you. Many of us have been using Signal for years, and also using alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo, to enhance our privacy. But at the same time, don’t fall for the misinformation that your private messages are being read.
If you’re still confused whether to continue WhatsApp or uninstall it, simply ask yourself 2 questions which are as follows:-
- How much you value your privacy?
- How much you trust Facebook?
If you’re okay with these 2 questions and you’re sleeping peacefully at night knowing that someone might be using your data to influence you, then you can continue with using WhatsApp as your primary messenger. If not, then please use either Telegram or Signal.
