How WhatsApp works with other Facebook products
whatsapp.com
whatsapp.com
In my country WhatsApp is used for everything from talking to friends through setting up a date with your hairdresser to group activities like school parents groups.
There is an expectation that the information you share by someone having your number is very limited - the person that has your number can text you, yes, but they can't know about you, and you can limit the small amount of info you let through like your profile picture or your online state using privacy controls.
This expectation is completely removed when adding somebody's number to your contact list is enough for Facebook to do its magic and reveal the owner in your Facebook friends suggestions.
I've had it happen dozens of times, I start texting a tinder match and suddenly her profile is there in my suggestions. It's common for it to misfire and I end up being suggested the personal account of the owner of a business I bought something for. They don't even need to text you, you add the number to your phone's contact list and it's there.
Facebook needs to be broken apart, and we need a law that the data you share with an app can't be used for others period, even more so if they were separate businesses when you started using the service, and a change of policies is not enough - you might already be locked in.
Still agree with your opinion, though. Also, I find it annoying that you can't message someone on WhatsApp without adding them to contacts.
You can, if you're both part of a group chat together. Tap on their number and a pop up comes up allowing you to message said person.
Also agree with the opinions expressed even with similar experience to yourself (no Facebook or messenger apps installed, WhatsApp contacts don't appear as suggestions on FB website).
Literally doesn't matter what you do, it's what other people do with your data. I can tell from this guy I interned for 15 years ago that at one point he uploaded his entire address book to Facebook including my name, email and phone number because he still shows up in facebook recommendations to me today on Facebook and IG.
Never gave them access to my contacts either or even had him in my contacts but FB's shadow profile knows he knows who I am.
The trick that i use is to type their number into the domain wa.me in the following format https://wa.me/xxxxxxxxxxx
That allows you to open a chat to that specific number without adding them to your contact list.
They are almost certainly sharing data behind the scenes, they openly say this in op's link about how WhatsApp uses your data:
> 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), (...) across the Facebook Company Products;
There is a small chance that they've gotten all my data from the people at the other side of the conversation if they have the fb app installed I guess, which really isn't much better.
wa.me/263xxxxxxxxx?text=Hello
Opening that link will launch WhatsApp (or WhatsApp web) to the user's number and the text "Hello" in the message field.
Android v8, Firefox v68.6.
Open firefox settings, toggle 'open links in app'.
(or)
Open a chat with yourself in whatsapp. https://wa.me/your-number . You can spam anything here, it's personal and only you can see it.
They send wa.me/number-of-person-you-are-contacting in that chat. Click on it and it will start a chat with person-you-are-contacting.
All numbers MUST be in international format. Country code and number.
Looks like it is some half completed demo integration rather than production ready...
Open a chat with yourself in whatsapp. https://wa.me/your-number . You can spam anything here, it's personal and only you can see it.
They send wa.me/number-of-person-you-are-contacting in that chat. Click on it and it will start a chat with person-you-are-contacting.
All numbers MUST be in international format. Country code and number.
Is this a new limitation? On iOS I'm still able to message someone new using only their phone number. Though I'm blocking contact access so perhaps that's why.
and we also got very high presence of Truecaller so basically if you expose your phone number anybody can find your real name and FB profile
Within seconds of installing, I received a telegram from a co-worker who jokingly said: "For privacy reasons, when you install Telegram, it sends a message to all of your contacts."
It simply creates your virtual contact list from the contact lists of your contacts.
How do you know who you can message with it if the app can’t check who has it?
Do you, every time you want to message someone, manually copy in their number? For every person you communicate with?
What if they previously didn’t have WhatsApp installed, but have since installed, so you also need to check again every time you want to message someone who formerly didn’t have WhatsApp.
That’s not going to work for people.
> What if they previously didn’t have WhatsApp installed, but have since installed, so you also need to check again every time you want to message someone who formerly didn’t have WhatsApp.
Why is this important? I use WhatsApp instead of SMS for contacts who don't have (free) SMS or who want the extra security. It's pretty intentional. Why would I want to use WhatsApp with everyone? That concept seems aligned with Facebook's goals, not mine.
Because WhatsApp (and other messengers) offer a far superior messaging experience to SMS: higher fidelity media, on time delivery, delivery status, e2e, and many more. Better experience means that people actually use it.
As you say, for “extra security”. But not everyone arrived at the decision of “how much security” they need at the same moment in time. People come to and leave the WA platform, and it’s desirable for me to know where people are at now so I can use e2e in new places as opposed to only with the subset of my social graph that I manually copied and pasted in which had installed WA before me.
I don’t deny that you like your setup, but it sounds pretty painful and pretty unlikely to appeal to a broad swathe of people, which is essential when trying to combat mass surveillance.
(is mass surveillance why you jump through these hoops?)
WhatsApp by comparison was practically free. So it is not even about superior messaging experience, it also comes down to cost.
That's the thing: people (non-tech, non-privacy aware) are always trading privacy for convenience.
You ask them via other means? It might be slightly inconvenient, yes, but you almost make it sound like even SMS is an impossible task; SMS is not even that old and none of the millions who used it before there were even apps to do so had much of the problems you mention. Also because not everyone has a usecase requiring to know who has what app.
I run WhatsApp on an Android instance with an account solely for that, so no contacts etc, and literally all my contacts/groups in WhatsApp are people who at one point told 'let's do this via whatsapp'. Then again, I don't need to message people I don't know with it so I don't have any problems.
Do you, every time you want to message someone, manually copy in their number? For every person you communicate with?
No, just once, or else they send me a message and we're talking.
tldr; ok I'm not 'most people' in this regard, but still I think you're making things look way harder then they actually are
Even if you never touched Google/Facebook in your life, they have your number and many other data about you via other persons
Even if you never touched an Apple device in your life, they already have done Facial Recognition on you because your friends took a photo of you and tagged you (see the creepy HomeKit doorbells that recognise you despite you have never agreed to facial recognition)
Laws totally fail to address that aspect of Privacy
From economics there is the concept of "revealed preference", your individual subjective preferences are revealed by the choices you make. In this case, we can observe that Facebook's subjectively bad qualities are enough to demand politicians Do Something, but not enough to suffer the inconveniences of using a different chat app, etc.
The sad irony is that these points of concern are also potential advantages for competing platforms (e.g., Signal), and by regulating them away, Facebook/Whatsapp become further entrenched.
Presumably because they would like to be able to set up a date with their hairdresser and participate in parents groups. Maybe they could convince their friends to switch, but also maybe not. This is why there is a call for government intervention: a single person faces an enormous social cost for boycotting FB properties, but the government can coordinate either a change on Facebook’s end or a simultaneous changeover to other services.
I'm not clear on how to quantify "enormous". Many people don't use facebook and still manage to make appointments and lead fulfilling social lives.
That said, it is clear that for many people the "social cost" is larger than the "facebook evil cost", even for people demanding government intervention. I guess for those people, the cost for demanding politicians Do Something is even less.
It depends a lot on your country or region. Your life is different from other people's lives.
In my country, decoupling from Facebook is pretty easy. Google, less so, but doable.
In some countries, decoupling from certain apps or ecosystems will leave you pretty much stranded.
That's a problem, but it's their problem. Having a problem doesn't justify coercing others (in this case, Facebook) to solve it for them.
It's OK if we want to solve those problems for them, but it's not OK to force someone else to solve them.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/telegram-rus...
It now seems to be pivoting towards ad support, but isn't this exactly what people have been trying to get away from Facebook for?
Signal has stated that they will not support RCS (possibly that they can't due to technical limitations).
Ironically, Fluffychat, a Matrix client, is the outlier - it relies on Google Services Framework to deliver messages
Have your Apple friends install Signal, too.
> To access your data on a new device, you might have to enter the passcode for an existing or former device.
> Messages in iCloud also uses end-to-end encryption. If you have iCloud Backup turned on, your backup includes a copy of the key protecting your Messages. This ensures you can recover your Messages if you lose access to iCloud Keychain and your trusted devices. When you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future messages and isn't stored by Apple.
I didn't realize messages was an exception to storing the key on local devices.
iCloud Backup is not end to end encrypted.
That linked article is designed to be intentionally misleading.
Signal. It even has one of WhatsApp's founders behind it now.
Signal groups are a mess.
Ah, Brazil.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_...
Because if so, man, whoever wrote this must have laughed a lot when they wrote it. You may not be able to match 100% of users of course, but with the amount of personal data FB has access to it should be able to match a good chunk of the userbase with a high degree of confidence if it wanted to.
Unable is followed by "to establish reliable automated matching".
I think the key words here are "reliable" and "automated". There's a ton of wiggle room in those words.
> "The Notifying Party submitted that integration between WhatsApp and Facebook would pose significant technical difficulties. Notably, integration of WhatsApp's and Facebook's networks would require matching WhatsApp users' profiles with their profiles on Facebook (or vice versa). This would be complicated without the users' involvement since Facebook and WhatsApp use different unique user identifiers: Facebook ID and mobile phone number, respectively. Consequently, Facebook would be unable to automatically and reliably associate a Facebook ID with a valid phone number used by a user on WhatsApp. Matching of WhatsApp profiles with Facebook profiles would most likely have to be done manually by users, which in the Notifying Party's view is likely to result in a significant backlash from both users of Facebook and WhatsApp who do not want to match their accounts. Finally, the Notifying Party stated that, beyond the difficulties in matching user IDs, significant engineering hurdles would have to be overcome to enable cross-platform communications, reflecting the fundamentally different architecture of Facebook and WhatsApp (including the former being cloud-based, the latter not)."
It seems the EU commission interpreted the statement as 'not possible'. Facebook played them.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/competition/mergers/cases/decisions/m72...
How am I doing so far: * I miss a lot of work stuff even though some update me on the important stuff through Signal. * I lost contact with friends I can't communicate with anymore. * I feel that I have more free time to focus on my family and close friends. Probably because my neighbors can't sneak into my head with things that don't really effect me. * The frequency I check my phone dropped by 80%. * Since I closed my instagram account and Facebook acount 8 years ago, I am now "Zuckerberg free".
It's hard but It's Worth it.
My account was dead for about two years or so before that. Within a minute or two of signing up with my (real) email and phone number, basically my whole friend list from back when I had an account, people I've texted on whatsapp once years ago, etc. were in friend suggestions. Downright creepy.
Before Facebook, if you tried to explain to a layman that your social data can be used to manipulate entire elections, people probably would have looked at you with strange and furrowed brows. Now, it's a question of the best way to address the issue.
I finally made one and I had neatly sorted real life friends as part of my friends suggestion.
That's when I realized they already had a shadow profile of me from everyone else, all I did was activate it and increase their confidence level from 95% or something to 100%...
What usually happens is that those people have you on their contact lists, which they uploaded to Facebook to find more friends.
Because funnily enough, I didn't place blame in my comment. I just pointed out my 'annoyance'. You, on the other hand, concluded something from that. Ironically.
People here respond to the top comment directly with a point that's not even closely related to the top comment. And then everyone else follows.
If you're making a new point that's not gaining from the chained comments feature or directly conversing/adding on to the person above you, just create a new comment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)#Encryption_p...
[2] https://threatpost.com/signal-audit-reveals-protocol-cryptog...
[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1013.pdf [PDF]
End-to-end encryption is sold as a bulletproof privacy solution, it might solve the most important element of privacy (having your messages not readable by others), in the end they have metadata stored in their end, your social graph, when you are online/offline etc. (there are others things i am sure)
So giving your trust to another party just because they look “promising” does not work. Centralization is the source of all Evil.
I do agree that moving to another centralized service is not the optimal option, but seeing the amount of effort they put into ensuring all new features ensure your privacy instills a lot of confidence in their service.
Long-term I'm personally rooting for either Element, Briar, or Session, but also realize they are not quite ready for mainstream and even when they are, they may be out of reach for grandma.
in the short term I've migrated most of my family friends, including my grandma, to Signal and have had zero complaints. It works more or less like WhatsApp but pretty much guarantees your privacy, which I appreciate.
> I do agree that moving to another centralized service is not the optimal option, but seeing the amount of effort they put into ensuring all new features ensure your privacy instills a lot of confidence in their service.
Two sentences are contradicting with each other. You can not trust someone just because they "promise", I am not undervaluing their work, all I am saying is moving from party to party doesn't solve the problem in whole.
Signal's ridiculous marketing tricks like using quotes from Snowden, Schneier et al makes me laugh.
If I am given two options to choose between moving to another centralized service like Signal and staying with WhatsApp, I am okay with the latter option. Not because WhatsApp is better, but honestly as an end user I don't see any value. WhatsApp requires my phone number, so does Signal. WhatsApp is centralized, so is Signal. WhatsApp doesn't allow another client to operate, so does Signal.
So what's the difference, Signal is open-source and non-profit? Nah, I don't buy this nonsense.
Sometimes I wish I had studied law...
The fact here is that network effects play a big role in these kind of business models.
Moreover think about the fact that whatsapp was one of the first entrants, and was bought by Mark Zuckerberg. Brand is another big player when we consider and analyse that competitive landscape...
Security is one of the most important factors nowadays, especially if we consider the data breaches number, that is increasing dramatically (600% since covid-19 outbreak). But are like p2p models, if there aren't many people to create traffic, it isn't worth it (for the moment at least). And in case of messaging apps these people must be your friends! (Word-of-mouth)
Do not misunderstand me, I am 100% for security and privacy, but here users are driven by other factors unfortunately.
If I say to a friend "I'll message you on WhatsApp" they will be like "ok great".
If I say to a friend "I'll message you on Signal" they will be like "What is that? Oh I have to download something? Don't you have WhatsApp? Screw it just send me a text."
So you can't really say "Apart from larger user base why do people use it?". It's like saying "Apart from an inability to breathe, why don't people live underwater?"
All people who are important to me migrated. Some refused for a long time for no reason, but in the end installed a separate app alongside WA.
But I get your position: Judging by the amount of unfair usability and amount of third parties involved in any co.uk-domain, it appears to me that the common folk gives a shit about it over there. However, I wont get any site a visit who does the above. There are alternatives to gain information.
"larger user base" is an understatement; the difference is several orders of magnitude.
(on a personal level, I don't enjoy using WA, but it's necessary here unless you only communicate within a bubble of tech workers)
You can’t just convince the majority of the users with privacy arguments or even hypothetical extra features from Signal. Only if WhatsApp would introduce something really annoying (huge ads, fees, constant technical issues) people would start to move. But even Telegram which is so much better IMHO (albeit privacy by default isn’t better) will hardly be #1 ever if nothing of the above happens.
But even if we assume WhatsApp should be multiplexing the streams on their end, unmetered bandwidth is cheap and again we aren't talking about 4k streams and hundreds of participants per call.
"They trust me — dumb fucks"
to quote the man himself
But yes as an early Android adopter, I was a bit surprised I never had to pay the yearly $1.
- Share live location. If I need to meet up with somebody, or let someone know how far away I am and when I'm arriving, I use share live location. "Share for 1 hour." In Signal you can share your location at a moment in time but it doesn't update.
- Broadcast messages ("mass text" basically). In WhatsApp I can send a message to a list of people without the people on the list seeing each other (to them it looks like I messaged them 1:1). In Signal I would have to use a group and all the members would see each other.
What's the use case for this? "Happy New Year!"?
1. I'm on a few "mailing lists" that are delivered via WhatsApp, like "weekly one-minute sermon" type stuff.
2. I have a friends that are all into the same kind of music but don't know each other. I use broadcast to send them links to bandcamp, spotify, etc.
3. I have a broadcast list for my local friends. If I want to get rid of something or looking for something ("hey I'm getting rid of this, do you want it" [photo]) I use that list.
This can be an extremely useful feature at times, and is also E2E encrypted with a similar model to group chats (but modified to allow for lossy delivery).
> Broadcast messages
This is one of those interesting features that many people are completely oblivious to, don't use, and don't understand why anyone needs. Meanwhile, many other people use it constantly and simply can't live without it.
But I simply find the whole chat ecosystem so depressing. A few years ago at least I could chat with Google Talk people via Jabber. It is really absurd that instant messaging is not federated like email. Of course there is one explanation: while Email was invented in the 70s at research institutions with goals beyond profit, IM already started in the 90s with companies trying to capitalize their user-base with vendor lock-in... (ICQ, MSN, etc.). Sad, sad, sad.
As I understand it, in order to have real end-to-end encryption (the real stuff, not some marketing term) each device has to generate a long set of keys and with each message sent, they cycle through to the next key. If WhatsApp is doing what it reports it's doing and it actually is end-to-end encrypted then the web application needs to use your phone because it needs that set of keys. I'm not sure if it specifically sends through your phone or if it sends via the webapp, but you have to use the keys in the correct order or the device you're contacting won't be able to decrypt the next message.
There's no particular reason that that has to be two phones though - could be desktop, wifi tablet etc.. That limitation is a result of a 'product' decision where your identity on WhatsApp is a mobile phone number. That decision was a big part of what allowed WhatsApp to scale quickly (people didn't need to create an account, just install the app and start messaging people whose numbers they had).
It can be done, but it shouldn't be done if you actually care about security or privacy.
- That desktop browsers can be less secure
- That software can work around that
- That mobile can be more secure
- That mobile can also be false security as "0 days" are currently in the wild and mobile phones are typically always online
- Etc.
If you truly want security, there's a really compelling argument for live-booting a distro like https://tails.boum.org/ and then rebooting when you're done. On the other side there are compelling phones such as the Libre 5 (assuming there are no current 0 days).
However whatsapp currently assumes that each user has one (primary) device and only handles encryption and delivery to one device. It isn't impossible to fix (example Matrix) but it does require effort and slightly more server resources (you need to store messages for longer on average)
As you said, we in Europe are kind of forced to have WA installed, but at least you don't have to use it as your primary client if you don't want to. You can even deploy it to an Android VM and go completely headless, if you feel the need.
Haven't used WhatsApp for months and then only for a few days to talk to someone from US.
My friends were heavy WhatsApp users but we changed one group after another to Telegram after WhatsApp were brought.
Telegram is far from perfect though so I hope to move to Matrix within a few months.
The joke is that it used to be. FB Messanger and Google Chat had XMPP hooks so you could talk to whatever other platform, Slack used to have an IRC integration, MSN/AIM/ICQ never tried too hard to get stop reverse-engineers from putting their protocols into all-in-one messengers... Then businesses realized the value of locking in users and becoming walled gardens.
WA and Telegram have a pure web client when you want to quickly have access to your chats without installing anything.
If you decide to install the standalone clients you'll find that Telegram is vastly ahead of Signal. You can change the spellchecking language and add dictionaries, you have a lot more options for formatting messages (code blocks etc...), it deals better with multimedia content like inline audio, it's a lot faster and less resource-hungry.
The only reason I still bother with Signal is because I know that, in theory, from a security perspective it's the better of the three. In practice it's by far the worst though.
That's a weird thing to say. How is anything objectively ugly? It is a matter of opinion after all.
First screen asked me to wiggle my finger on the screen without offering any explanation. Second screen gave me a random string and told me that's my ID. Third screen asked me to add a password for Threema Safe, whatever that is. I then couldn't leave that screen at all because the on-screen keyboard covered over the next button, and the one big green button that was visible did nothing. Eventually I accidentally swiped and got to another screen that asked me what Threema Safe I wanted to use, like I have any idea what a Threema Safe is. After that it asked me to put in a username, even though I already have a Threema ID from several screens ago. Then it asked for my phone number. So now it has a Threema ID, a phone number and a username and I have to guess which of those is useful. Then it asked me to sync my contacts, I didn't do that. Finally, I got to a screen with a QR code, my nickname, my Threema ID, something asking me to Enter Code for Linked Number, and a Key Fingerprint. This thing bears only a passing resemblance to a messaging app.
Most of that setup I kind of understand, but then I'm the sort of person who reads HN. There is not a hope in hell of getting even 1% of the people I know to even make it through the setup process though.
Once inside, I apparently have one contact called ECHOECHO who, when I message them, repeat the message back to me. The messaging UI is slightly nicer than Signal and WhatsApp's though, but not as nice as Telegram's.
And yeah, it may only have 1% of users but thats's only because 95% have WA... It's a choice about freedom and you have to start somewhere. I converted more than 50% of my contacts to Threema - the rest has expensive phones but obviously no money to protect their privacy.
>(Threema) has the most secure encryption mechanism
Can you elaborate on that? How is it better than what Signal and Whatsapp use?
An awesome feature for me is this (from their FAQ): The dots are an indicator for a contact's verification level. They don't affect the encryption strength, but are a measure for the probability, that the saved public key of a contact belongs indeed to that contact.
Level 1 (red): The ID and public key have been obtained from the server because you received a message from this contact for the first time or added the ID manually. No matching contact was found in your address book (by phone number or email), and therefore you cannot be sure that the person is who they claim to be in their messages.
Level 2 (orange): The ID has been matched with a contact in your address book (by phone number or email). Since the server verifies phone numbers and email addresses, you can be reasonably sure that the person is who they claim to be.
Level 2 (blue): This verification level is only available in Threema Work; it indicates that the Threema ID belongs to an internal company contact.
Level 3 (green): You have personally verified the ID and public key of the person by scanning their QR code. Assuming their device has not been hijacked, you can be very sure that messages from this contact were really written by the person that they indicate.
Level 3 (blue): This verification level is only available in Threema Work; it indicates that the Threema ID belongs to an internal contact whose ID and public key you have verified by scanning their QR code.
Basically they offer you a drastically reduced price to only access WhatsApp, mostly text message without media at that. Compared to the data plan that can access the whole internet it is very very cheap to use just WhatsApp.
The cheapest WhatsApp bundle on the most popular network (Econet) is currently at around 51cents to text the whole week (65MB of data) vs the $13 for 8gigs. Granted the 8gigs is for a month but $13 is a big amount in this part of the world, and with regular data there's the aspect of discipline to not use all that data on youtube and other data hungry apps/websites.
How we work with the Facebook Companies
In this article, we are providing additional information to our users in the European Region. What are the Facebook Companies?
WhatsApp is one of the Facebook Companies. The Facebook Companies include, among others, Facebook, Facebook Technologies, and WhatsApp, and together offer the Facebook Company Products. Why does WhatsApp share information with the Facebook Companies?
WhatsApp works and shares information with the other Facebook Companies to receive services like infrastructure, technology, and systems that help us provide and improve WhatsApp and to keep WhatsApp and the other Facebook Companies safe and secure. When we receive services from the Facebook Companies, the information we share with them is used to help WhatsApp in accordance with our instructions. Working together allows us for example to:
Provide you fast and reliable messaging and calls around the world and understand how our Services and features are performing.
Ensure safety, security, and integrity across WhatsApp and the Facebook Company Products by removing spam accounts and combating abusive activity.
Connect your WhatsApp experience with Facebook Company Products.
In order to receive services from the Facebook Companies, WhatsApp shares the information we have about you as described in the “Information We Collect” section of the Privacy Policy. For example, to provide WhatsApp with analytics services, Facebook processes the phone number you verified when you signed up for WhatsApp, some of your device information (your device identifiers associated with the same device or account, operating system version, app version, platform information, your mobile country code and network code, and flags to enable tracking of the update acceptance and control choices), and some of your usage information (when you last used WhatsApp and the date you first registered your account, and the types and frequency of your features usage) on WhatsApp’s behalf and in accordance with our instructions.
WhatsApp also shares information with other Facebook Companies when this is necessary for the purpose of promoting safety, security, and integrity across the Facebook Companies. This includes the sharing of information that enables Facebook and the other Facebook Companies to determine whether a certain WhatsApp user is also using other Facebook Company Products, and to assess whether the other Facebook Companies need to take action, either against such user or to protect them. For example, WhatsApp could share the information that is necessary to enable Facebook to also take action against an identified spammer on Facebook, such as information on the incident(s) as well as the phone number they verified when they signed up for WhatsApp or device identifiers associated with the same device or account. Any such transfer is carried out in accordance with the “Our Legal Basis For Processing Data” section of the Privacy Policy. How is my WhatsApp information used by the Facebook Companies?
To receive services that will help WhatsApp operate, improve, and develop our business. When WhatsApp shares information with the Facebook Companies in these ways, the Facebook Companies act as service providers and the information we share with them is used to help WhatsApp in accordance with our instructions.
We share information with the other Facebook Companies as service providers. Service providers help companies like WhatsApp by providing infrastructure, technologies, systems, tools, information, and expertise to help us provide and improve the WhatsApp service for our users.
This enables us, for example, to understand how our Services are being used, and how it compares to usage across the Facebook Companies. By sharing information with the other Facebook Companies, such as the phone number you verified when you signed up for WhatsApp and the last time your account was used, we may be able to work out whether or not a particular WhatsApp account belongs to someone who also uses another service in the Facebook Companies. This allows us to more accurately report information about our Services and to improve our Services. So, for example, we can then understand how people use WhatsApp services compared to their use of other apps or services in the other Facebook Companies, which in turn helps WhatsApp to explore potential features or product improvements. We can also count how many unique users WhatsApp has, for example, by establishing which of our users do not use any other Facebook apps and how many unique users there are across the Facebook Companies. This will help WhatsApp more completely report the activity on our service, including to investors and regulators.
It also helps WhatsApp as we explore ways to build a sustainable business. For example, as we previously announced, we're exploring ways for people and businesses to communicate using WhatsApp, and this could include working with the other Facebook Companies to help people find businesses they're interested in and communicate with via WhatsApp. In this way, Facebook could enable users to communicate via WhatsApp with businesses they find on Facebook.
To keep WhatsApp and other Facebook family services safe and secure.
We share information with the other Facebook Companies in accordance with the “Our Legal Basis For Processing Data” section of the Privacy Policy, and vice versa, to help fight spam and abuse on our Services, help keep them secure, and promote safety, security, and integrity on and off our Services. So if, for example, any member of the Facebook Companies discovers that someone is using its services for illegal purposes, it can disable their account and notify the other Facebook Companies so that they can also consider doing the same. In this way, we only share information for this purpose in relation to users that have first been identified as having violated our Terms of Service or threatened the safety or security of our users or others, about which other members of our family of companies should be warned.
To keep WhatsApp and other Facebook Companies' services safe and secure, we need to understand which accounts across the Facebook Companies relate to the same user, so we can take appropriate action when we identify a user who violates our Terms of Services or presents a safety or security threat to others.
We do not share data for improving Facebook products on Facebook and providing more relevant Facebook ad experiences.
Today, Facebook does not use your WhatsApp account information to improve your Facebook product experiences or provide you more relevant Facebook ad experiences on Facebook. This is a result of discussions with the Irish Data Protection Commission and other Data Protection Authorities in Europe. We're always working on new ways to improve how you experience WhatsApp and the other Facebook Company Products you use. Should we choose to share such data with the Facebook Companies for this purpose in the future, we will only do so when we reach an understanding with the Irish Data Protection Commission on a future mechanism to enable such use. We'll keep you updated on new experiences we offer and our information practices.
We share information for all WhatsApp users if they choose to use our Services. This may include those WhatsApp users who are not Facebook users because we need to have the ability to share information for all of our users, if necessary, in order to be able to receive valuable services from the Facebook Companies and fulfill the important purposes described in our Privacy Policy and this article.
In all cases, we share the minimum amount of information that is needed to fulfill these purposes. We also ensure that the information we share is up to date, so if you choose to update your WhatsApp phone number, for example, that number will also be updated by the members of the Facebook family who have received it from us.
Importantly, WhatsApp does not share your WhatsApp contacts with Facebook or any other members of the Facebook Companies for use for their own purposes, and there are no plans to do so. What choices do I have about the Facebook Companies' use of my WhatsApp information?
You can always stop using our Services and delete your account through the in-app Delete My Account feature. Deleting your WhatsApp account will not affect your ability to continue using other apps and services offered by the other Facebook Companies, just as deleting your Facebook account, for example, will not affect your ability to continue using WhatsApp. Please see WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy for further information on what happens when you delete your WhatsApp account.
For those living in the EU and UK (where GDPR still applies), has anyone had success with an Article 21 "right to object" request? For example, objecting to the sharing of data with Facebook when using WhatsApp. It is not an absolute right, it's supposed to be depending on individual circumstances so I expect there's lots of wiggle room for their DPO/legal team to refuse, or just stonewall. I'd love to be wrong, so please share...
Facebook breaches the GDPR when it comes to data subject access requests and appears to get away with it: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ so Article 21 is likely to have the same outcome. Facebook (and other companies) also breach the GDPR with their non-compliant consent prompts (where you can't actually decline) when visiting their websites and also get away with it.
I don't know how I managed this.
I think Instagram has an option to not show your number and not to appear in recommendations, but I'm sure it doesn't work.
Welcome to facebook ads
This particular one is very open ended. Facebook's internal security team and it's external contractors have internal tools that use Facebooks App on people's phones to locate, block and alert if marked individuals are near company premises or high ranking executives.
Let's say you protest against Facebook outside their offices, they could look you up on Facebook, find your account and if you enter a zone near their office it will send them an alert. Similarly someone with access to the system can ping your phone anywhere in the world to find a location with only the very basic controls present to prevent it from happening. No doubt the internal teams expand that to include key executives, suppliers etc.
In theory they should be logged in to their own account to do this and not able to ping people in their immediate circles, in reality no doubt they could probably have a false account to bypass this. If you think about the power of this. Hundreds of people with limited oversight free to ping whomever they want as long as they can create a loose reason to do it. Remember when the Saudis were paying people with insider access at Twitter, you could imagine how much the ability of people to ping a FB user anywhere in the world is worth. Two billion users...The NSA can only dream of such access. From intelligence targets to lovers to competitors, hundreds of people have access to this data because of FB policies and tech.
At least with FB you don't have to have the app on the phone. WhatsApp is however essentially the new SMS, it's impossible not to avoid it...and now slowly slowly FB is retaking control.
No wonder Brian Acton has gone to Signal. The original vision of WhatsApp is rapidly being eroded by FB. Yes WhatsApp has e2e but slowly FB is being FB and looking for return on its investment.
It seems more about how WhatsApp/Facebook the company use your data in the background, rather than "how WhatsApp works ...".
It's a weird situation really.
Google Drive backups are not. [1]
Should the wrong person/people slip up, your messages are no longer end-to-end encrypted, and are stored on Google's servers
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/whatsapp-warns-free-google-dri...
"showing relevant offers and ads across the Facebook Company Products;"
a.k.a.: "we absolve ourselves of all responsibility because you should read the million or so pages of dense legalese yourself"
And this is most likely illegal under GDPR.