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Comment by ejlangev | Hacker News Reader

If you believe that a company whose whole purpose is to use data on you to sell ads won't use data on you that it collects to sell ads then I have a bridge to sell you.

Funny that people complained so much about GDPR being bad for business and then get upset when things like this happen. It's almost like the two are related or something...

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> If you believe that a company whose whole purpose is to use data on you to sell ads won't use data on you that it collects to sell ads then I have a bridge to sell you.

On this particular case I would probably agree with you, but I'm not sure it's true in general. From what I understand, for example, Facebook doesn't use your messages for ads. It seems unlikely but not 100% implausible that it could be the same here.

Depends on what you mean by "ads". I stopped using FB since April but still use WhatsApp because my contacts use it. In the last 2 weeks, I've been getting email spam notifications to check what these WhatsApp contacts are doing on FB. i.e. FB has been sending me notifications about people who are both on FB and on WhatsApp, and only those with whom I message on WhatsApp on a regular basis. The likelihood of this being entirely coincidental is probably close to 0.

They may not use the content of the message but all its metadata which may even be more valuable, alone because it's easier to process automatically.

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