WhatsApp is going to share your phone number with Facebook | Hacker News Reader

WhatsApp is going to share your phone number with Facebook

bigstory.ap.org

138 pointskawera84 comments

Remember when Whatsapp got bought?

    Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA, and we built WhatsApp
    around the goal of knowing as little about you as possible [...]
    If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values,
    we wouldn’t have done it. Instead, we are forming a partnership 
    that would allow us to continue operating independently and autonomously.
    Our fundamental values and beliefs will not change. Our principles
    will not change. Everything that has made WhatsApp the leader in
    personal messaging will still be in place. Speculation to the 
    contrary isn’t just baseless and unfounded, it’s irresponsible. [0]

Well, good news for them. They never outlined what exactly their principles were, so they weren't technically lying. We just get to see how thin their principles (retroactively) turn out to be.

[0] https://blog.whatsapp.com/529/Setting-the-record-straight

Cory Doctorow explains why we need a "Ulysses Pact" to avoid situations like this.

http://craphound.com/news/2016/06/24/how-to-protect-the-futu...

Does anyone actually believe a word which these companies say? I think if at all there was a company which deserved some serious scrutiny under anti-trust, it was Facebook. Much more than Google or MSFT. They have done exactly the things which is supposed to be prevented by antitrust - I mean the "spirit of the law" and not the letter of the law. But hey, there are SO many social networks - look at LinkedIn, look at Google Plus, Twitter. Except that FB somehow ends up with all the data which everyone wishes wasn't stored in one place.

I think it is just a matter of time before FB starts influencing elections to suit THEIR agenda (assuming they have not already started). Remember the experiment where they tried to deliberately influence people's emotions? [1] FB is now effectively a super creepy uber-government.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-...

Question to anyone who works at Facebook: how come you promptly participate in the latest HN announcement of the newest JavaScript open source framework from FB and never bother to show up on these threads. Is ethics just completely off the table when you step foot inside the company doors? I remember someone talking about Zynga the company having "sold their soul". Not that Zynga doesn't rank very high on that chart, but boy, does FB absolutely top that list by a wide margin.

I agree with many points you have stated and feel the same way about Facebook (vs. Google or others), but I do believe there is a big difference between the ethics and values of many Facebook employees and the evil things that Facebook as a company and Mark Zuckerberg want to do. I'm sure they like working on things that make a difference (including open sourcing some big impact stuff) while at the same time not liking the privacy policies and what their employer does with data collection.

I am yet to see even a single FB employee openly admit he/she is not happy with "so and so" policy but wants to stay at FB to continue working on the things which make an impact. And please give me a reference if this is incorrect.

Put another way, the silence is starting to become too damning. What else do they know but never talk about?

And yes, I feel the same way about every single one of the megacorps. However, I fear FB the most. They already have a long track record of ruthlessness when it comes to pushing the boundaries of ethical behavior.

Am I too harsh in thinking that trusting anything a tech company says is a bit unreasonable?

I'm like 99% certain they've been doing this for a while. I've noticed that anybody I talk to using WhatsApp quickly appears as a suggested contact on Facebook. As far as I'm aware, I did nothing to enable this.

It does seem awfully creepy, but I guess if you care about privacy you're not using Facebook much anyway…

Yes, I found the same (in South Africa, so have to assume that's globally true)

How creepy Facebook is finally clicked for me after I gave my neighbor my phone number once moving to a new neighborhood. You know... in case my house lights on fire or something while I'm out.

That night Facebook was suggesting I add my elderly neighbors as friends. We have 0 friends in common and I don't have Facebook installed on my phone (I just use the browser) so the only excuse I have is when they added me they must have some "share my contacts with Facebook" feature enabled. Now there's some forever connection between them and me on Facebook's servers even though I don't publicly link my phone number to Facebook, it's only added as a password/security recovery.

I am pretty sure Facebook also makes a friend suggestion to you when the other person searched for your name or looked at your profile at any time in the past. Maybe your neighbor searched for your name after you gave your phone number to them.

I believe FB also suggests based on location. If both were connected to FB on their phones when meeting in person, the location metadata is used.

Facebook also does this for people I follow on Instagram but have zero connections with otherwise.

I just looked at the suggested friends page: among the first recommended friends there is a person I've never met in person, but a friend of mine sent me a picture of their business card via Whatsapp. I sent this person an e-mail a couple of days ago, but it was gmail -> gmail.

Maybe this person stalked me and that is why she appeared on my suggested friends page?

> Maybe this person stalked me and that is why she appeared on my suggested friends page?

I think that's it. In quite a few of these 'creepy connections' I think it's usually something similar. If other people are anything like me, the first thing they'll do - when convenient - is to look you up on facebook.

That doesn't make it less creepy of course, but it can explain many, if not most of these situations.

It 100% is. Theres someone i've NEVER spoken to in my life other than over whatsapp, they know noone I know and yet they popped up on my suggested friends list.

The facebook app prefers to sync your contacts with it in your phone. ?You do get the choice not to, but it certainly was a dark pattern at one point, and persistent.

> As far as I'm aware, I did nothing to enable this.

Correct, but if the other person adds you to THEIR contact list, and shares THEIR contact list with Facebook, FB can then learn your phone number (without your Whatsapp ever sending it to FB).

> It does seem awfully creepy

Everything about Facebook is, I deleted my account 4 years ago. Opened another one with a different email address last week. It instantly started suggesting people who I knew despite me not entering anything other than an email and phone number.

It's super creepy how it pretty much already knows who you are from data your friends have shared with it.

To avoid this, simply collect and destroy any phones owned by your friends who might have your phone number or email in their contact lists. I always use a sledge hammer for this, but some people prefer a sturdy boot. Don't forget to recycle!

I know it's a joke, but it got me wondering: What kind of treatment do you need nowadays to actually safely destroy flash storage? I doubt a single smash from a sledgehammer/boot has a good chance of destroying SIM and internal storage and µSD card such that forensic analysis can't recover its data. Thermite?

A microwave oven works really well... Only takes (literally!) 1 second. OK, 2 if you want to be thorough.

It's flashy, but does it really destroy the charge in the cells?

Why make everything so difficult? So many options that it's hard to choose: EMP, solar storms, lightning, pyroclastic flows.. just stand right next to any cataclysmic cosmic event and you'll be taken care of.

If you have full disk encryption (that you can rely on and no other security issues to deal with), then just erasing it by "throwing away the encryption key" is easier than physical destruction. Are there reasons why physical destruction would be preferred if these conditions are met?

Take a look at this talk from DEF CON 23 on what it takes to safely destroy HDDs (spoiler: even explosions don't quite cut it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y

It's really sad how we lost control of our data.

I always refused to inform my phone number to facebook. But they definitely try to guess it . It's funny how sometimes the FB app ask me "is xxxx xxxx your number?" Well, luckily it still has not succeeded.

Once, I grabbed one of those guessed numbers and asked (over SMS) to that unknown person what was his name. It was no surprise when he told me that we have the same name and our surname started with the same letter.

I think now they will stop guessing.

It just gave you a random valid phone number, along with a name (yours)? Doesn't that qualify as leaking PII?

They're Facebook's property. They have all the rights to grab whatever the heck they can find on you, to slice and dice the data for their advantage.

Stay two miles apart from their properties, if you do not wish to be touched.

I never was on whatsapp, but I can imagine signing up for a property pre-aquisition and then being powerless to stop more of my data being sucked up by Facebook. Is the only solution to never sign up for a service without a privacy policy that lets you remove your data from the company in the event of a sale? I don't think I have ever seen such a clause..

It's not that I don't want any of my data in Facebook, that's more trouble than it's worth. It's that I don't want every detail of my life collated in one place. regardless of what that place is.

> Stay two miles apart from their properties, if you do not wish to be touched.

Presumably this includes FB-users.

What's the value of WhatsApp? It is the scale of the product. I use it because most of my friends are on it. There are many other alternatives to WhatsApp as pointed out by many in this thread, but none of them have nearly the same traction.

The only business model that allows such scale is the ad supported model. If WhatsApp was subscription based, I am sure they could not have achieved this scale. And I wouldn't have found value in it.

I realize that the ad supported model is what indirectly adds so much value to WhatsApp. Therefore, it makes sense to me to support that model if the model is reasonable enough. They have end to end encryption, which means my content is safe from prying eyes. That's already huge. So I really don't mind if they share my number with Facebook.

WhatsApp is Ad supported? I don't think so. I believe until last year they were subscription based.

They were and sometime last year turned everybody's subscription into a lifetime subscription. I think it's only a matter of time until WhatsApp will show ads. I see more and more content being shared through it - eventually it will rival Facebook.

It is a free service as of now (at least for me, initially they said I would have to pay after an year, but this never happened). Technically, they don't even have a business model till now. What they have is scale. I think they are afraid that a subscription model will make users churn and they would end up losing the scale. The only other alternative is an ad supported free model or a freemium model. I am wondering if a freemium model would make sense for WhatsApp.

I think the 'advantage' of WhatsApp is not as big as it seems. I already use Telegram with most people that I communicate with regularly who use WhatsApp for everything else.

Almost every one of those people grumbled at first about having to install another app. But because of how the dominant phone UI's work, it turns out to be almost frictionless.

I barely notice whether I get a message through WhatsApp, Telegram, or Facebook Messenger, because I either tap on the notification - and go right to the app and they all look basically the same - or I reply from the notification itself.

There's one friend who is so used to WhatsApp that he'll generally initiate conversations through that, even though I tend to initiate or further conversations in Telegram. Neither of us ever made a comment about it.

I hope I'm right, which means Facebook's stranglehold on communication and personal data might not be as strong as it appears. But I suspect they'll soon rollout more WeChat-like features such as payment, apps and bots that are a lot stickier.

For example, I've been playing around with a number of Telegram bots, and for the first time since I started using all these different chat apps, I am bothered when I have to use a non-Telegram app, because it doesn't support my bots (ranging from silly gif-search-bots to more useful poll-bots). Payment integration would be even 'stickier'.

> If WhatsApp was subscription based, I am sure they could not have achieved this scale. And I wouldn't have found value in it.

WhatsApp dropped its $1 annual subscription fee just this year: https://blog.whatsapp.com/615/Making-WhatsApp-free-and-more-...

"The ads would come through a Facebook program called "Custom Audiences," which lets a business upload lists of customers and phone numbers or other contact information the business has collected from warranty cards or other sources. Facebook matches the list to users with the same information and shows them ads. Facebook says it doesn't give out users' information to advertisers."

What happens if the advertiser uploads only one phone number to their campaign? Will they then know for certain if the one user clicked on the advert?

This has been going on for the longest. My Facebook is for family and friends and no coworkers. Google+ and Linkedin for coworkers. I have some of my coworkers phone numbers, and have never exchanged whatsApp messages with them. About earlier this year they all started showing up on my Facebook suggestions. I don't have Facebook app, I only use it through the web interface so it's not like they got to scan my contacts. This leads me to strongly believe that WhatsApp is the culprit.

Search is another explanation. Almost everyone I know, including myself, will search for pretty much anyone they interact with once they know a name. We're just too curious.

I don't use my real name on Facebook. Nor the email that's tied to my Facebook account with my coworkers.

It's possible that one or more of your co-workers just synced their contacts list, with all your email addresses and your phone number, to Facebook. That information, when intersected with the contacts list, with your phone number, any of your friends or family members synced with Facebook, could provide your details to Facebook (even if Facebook is not 100% sure, it might probably use it).

Finally. I've been trying to give facebook my number for a while. I've tried:

* Downloading Instagram without reading permissions.

* Downloading whatsapp.

* Downloading facebook chat.

* Having friends upload their entire contacts lists to FB, WA, IG, and chat.

* Using the website on mobile and directly putting in the data.

* Using any of their services to message friends my number which becomes a perfectly formatted tel link.

* tweeting zuck.

Facebook has still managed to not retain my number. I mean, I'm still waiting for them to phone me up. If you see this FB, call me maybe?

This is why using phone numbers as account identifiers is a bad idea. (For the users, at least. Not necessarily for the companies who want to own those users.)

Arguably WhatsApp would have gotten nowhere if they required users to construct screen names and manually build their social graph on yet another service.

It seems like every popular "personal" messaging service since Facebook got that way by bootstrapping on top of smartphone contacts.

My wife, who is rather dedicated about keeping away from Facebook, ordered a new pay-as-you-go SIM for use in an old Android phone specifically and only for WhatsApp.

It seemed a bit of an expensive tactic, having to top-up with an initial £10, but now I realise she was quite prescient.

Does she still have that number? If not, will the new owner get WhatsApp messages sent to her if they use WhatsApp?

Facebook paid a boat load of cash for WhatsApp. Why did you think they did it? out of the goodness of their heart? It's a business, people! and if you are not paying for it, their revenue stream must come from somewhere else. You are the product as much as the user. Get over it. If you don't like it, don't use it. Use Signal instead, which I do, and it's great.

There are also alternatives like Wire, which is really good although it doesn't have the adoption WhatsApp has.

They removed paid subscription several months ago. It seems that they can make more money from matching WhatsApp and Facebook social graphs than from annual subscription.

Did anyone ever pay for this? I mean, did they have some algorithm that concluded I and everyone I've asked were more likely to uninstall than pay, so we were never asked?

That's truly remarkable. Facebook doesn't make that much money per users (about $1/user/month, as best as I can figure). I know people who would pay twice that for a privacy-keeping subscription tier.

Do you know 2 billion people who would pay more than that for their privacy?

When WhatsApp did have subscriptions in some regions, it was 99 cents per year, not per month. Facebook in the recent times has been making more than that.

I'm surprised it took them so long.

Yeah, it's probably what they purchased WhatsApp for in the first place.

What happens if a whatsapp user doesn't have a Facebook account? More interestingly, what if a someone never uses FB account on his/her phone, like I do?

The latter isn't relevant - Facebook has full access to the data and likely has some major index to tie the two together. The simple communication data from Whatsapp alone is enough to find enough reference points for a high-confidence match with a Facebook profile.

As for the former, also likely irrelevant - Facebook has been keeping Shadow Profiles [1-4] for some time now, and whether or not you have an account, Facebook probably knows a lot about you just from what you/other people/your browser leaks about you. This information likely will just be amalgamated into the existing profile.

[1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/what-exactly-is-a-...

[2] http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/what-exactly-is-a-...

[3] http://www.wired.com/2014/10/privacy-friendster/

[4] https://spideroak.com/articles/facebook-shadow-profiles-a-pr...

You'll have a shadow account on FB. They do this for all non-users.

In my case, whatsapp asks to connect to my (non existent) facebook account every few weeks!

They store the data until you do (or until you register with a future FB product), if you finally get one they'll link the two together and already have an extensive profile of your behaviour they can now match with an FB profile.

Having the FB account is just the last piece of the puzzle, they already know who you are if you use Insta and WhatsApp

I for one disapprove

The article specifies that we can opt out of it. But it doesn't say how to do it? Does it? Does anyone know how to opt out?

Technically, you can but you a limited time window.

https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/general/26000016

This is a dark pattern. In fact, once you say "Agree" you only have 30 days to opt-out.

> After you agree to our updated Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, you will have an additional 30 days to make this choice by going to Settings > Account > Share my account info in the app.

I can't see such an option on my phone.

> Technically, you can

Technically you can't

The Facebook family of companies will still receive and use this information for other purposes such as improving infrastructure and delivery systems, understanding how our services or theirs are used, securing systems, and fighting spam, abuse, or infringement activities.

There are some places where your phone number will be used regardless of your choice - spam/abuse and there are some parts where it would not be used - targeted ads.

I don't see it on my phone either (iPhone).

Just did a bit of digging, seems there are two ways:

https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/general/26000016

I'm quite certain that maybe Apple has been doing this for a while as well. I can't seem to find any setting allowing FB to access my contacts but somehow people I've only texted, called or communicated over email are showing as suggestions too. But I'm not certain since they might have just cyber-stalked me.

Could it be that those other people are sharing that info to facebook? They only need one side to allow sharing contacts to find the connection.

OK - I think we can all agree this is shit. What are the (serious) alternatives?

Something that's not VC funded or otherwise depending on external money sources, or you'll have the same problem again a few years down the road when $Alternative is asked to turn a profit.

OK, but a messenger app's usefulness is almost entirely (as with social networks) governed by its network effects. You can have the best tool in the world, but if no one uses it, it's worthless.

It's a real shame that WA decided to drop their paid model (though at the price they were asking for it's clear to see why they'd favour this model).

Do we just have to face up to the reality with social networks and communication apps such as these, which is that the power comes from most people using it, and when most people don't care (s/care/understand/) about privacy, the "freemium" (we can haz data) model is the most obvious to profit from and so the one to which all the successful businesses are drawn to?

> OK, but a messenger app's usefulness is almost entirely (as with social networks) governed by its network effects. You can have the best tool in the world, but if no one uses it, it's worthless.

That's what we have been struggling with since the mid-90s, yes. IRC will always exists, but past that?

+1 for the suggestion of IRC being the best messaging app!

It hasn't the best user experience, but it's the only one I've been able to consistently use for the past 15 or so years. (Yes, yes, I was late to the party, I know.)

If you can convince even a few people in your network to try something different, I'd suggest trying Telegram, Wire and Signal. Then decide which works best for you to start pestering others too switch.

But the problem with that is that users will flock back to whatsapp, because everyone else is. We need a coherent movement to a single platform that doesn't fracture everyone across platforms. We've seen that happen when Whatsapp got acquired...

"My friends know not to call me" - Ron (from Parks and Rec)

What's the big deal?

WhatsApp has always said to take user privacy seriously. It's been one of their arguments of being a subscription-based app instead of free when they were not owned by Facebook yet: they didn't want to show any ads.

Now, this pretty much sums it up:

> Another change is potentially more controversial: WhatsApp says it will begin "coordinating" accounts with Facebook by sharing WhatsApp users' mobile phone numbers and device information, such as the type of operating system and other smartphone characteristics. The company says Facebook will employ the phone number internally to better identify WhatsApp users on Facebook, so it can recommend friends or show targeted advertising.

>WhatsApp has always said to take user privacy seriously.

and google has always said 'Don't be evil' lol

Phone number might identify you.

Is anyone surprised by this move? This seems part and parcel of the $19B purchase price.

Maybe now, they can make FacePhone a reality. Not having to worry about POTS phone numbers when you're dialing someone is a killer feature.

faceboook

facebook

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