Giving More Time for Our Recent Update
blog.whatsapp.com
blog.whatsapp.com
Please also remember Signal is run on donations: https://signal.org/donate/
With the WhatsApp news and many of my friends moving to Signal, I decided to donate $10 to help them scale. I had never donated to Signal before, but Signal has worked so well for me for over a year that it is definitely worth at least the little I donated.
Anyway no problem at all on the Jabber side. Many new people joining all the time and servers cope perfectly (because servers are decentralized but not chatrooms so running a server doesn't require considerable amounts of resources for global s2s consensus).
From earlier FB announcement (https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/privacy-matters-whatsapp-b...): “When Facebook acts as a hosting provider to a business, it will use the messages it processes on behalf of and at the instruction of the business. This is an industry standard practice among many companies that offer hosting solutions. While Facebook will not automatically use messages to inform the ads that a user sees, as is always the case, businesses will be able to use chats they receive for their own marketing purposes, which may include advertising on Facebook.”
Alternatively, the key word could be "expand". If they are already sharing everything they can, there is no further expansion possible.
As it stands, the policy refers to an FAQ entry [2] which leaves this almost completely open-ended: "The information we share with the other Facebook Companies [...] may include other information identified in the Privacy Policy section entitled ‘Information We Collect’"
That is, anything identified as information WhatsApp collects (including contact data) could be shared with Facebook.
[1]: https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/updates/privacy-policy [2]: https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/what-i...
> Facebook and the other companies in the Facebook family also may use information from us to improve your experiences within their services such as making product suggestions (for example, of friends or connections, or of interesting content) and showing relevant offers and ads.
https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/privacy-policy?_fb_noscript=1
They stress that they're not sharing message content, but metadata appears to be fair game.
I don't recall agreeing to that part, but then again I don't recall reading the privacy policy before.
(I reinstalled it briefly last year and used it for ome conversation with a stubborn guy who refused to install any of Signal or Telegram.)
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson
We’re now moving back the date on which people will be asked to review and accept the terms. No one will have their account suspended or deleted on February 8.”
Is there an unbiased analysis somewhere about what actually is changed by the new privacy policy?
Something has to have changed or else they wouldn't need people to accept new terms right?
I.e. it's more about allowing sharing ad viewership data between the platforms (FB, IG, WA). "But WhatsApp has no ads?", well, I guess in February^W March, Zuck's going to pop up on your phone and say "Surprise, motherfucker!".
On the topic of businesses, I remember booking a domestic plane ticket in Asia, giving the travel agency my phone number, and getting WhatsApp messages from the agency's business account. I guess there were no concerns about data privacy laws there...
This made me chuckle. I could totally see this becoming a thing, but I'm imagining it like Microsoft's Clippy. You're doing your normal thing using an app, when all of a sudden this caricature of The Zuck pops out of the lower corner and screams "I see you are looking at a post from someone in your friends list. Wouldn't you rather look at this <insert random thing> instead?" The harder/faster you swipe to make him go away the more insistent he gets.
[1] https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/answer...
Contact has your number and shares it with Facebook.
Your Facebook account has your number.
The link is made.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/18/15657158/facebook-whatsap...
If you cared for my privacy there wouldn't be need for this change in ToS, would it?
If so many users have switched to Signal in such a short time span that it brought the Signal infrastructure to its knees, you would assume there would by naysayers climbing over each other about the end of WhatsApp. If they are there, they have not made it into my news feeds, yet.
Anecdotally, my 70-something mother-in-law is willfully apathetic about privacy and I remember getting into an argument with her on her use of Whatsapp a few years ago (her take, that I was silly for caring about privacy). Two days ago she asked me what this Signal thing is that all her friends are switching to, and how she can do it as well.