Can someone give me a simple non-cynical explanation on what the update in terms is about? From my understanding, it only pertains to communications with businesses and give them some Facbeook tools to manage their communications with customers.
Correct me if I am wrong but my understanding is that to run a WhatsApp bot you currently basically need to run a version of the whole app.
No idea if my theory is correct but if it is I wonder why they won't just provide a good library which implrments their protocol, E2E encryption and everything.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25875802
Not trivial to setup and operate, as it was designed for high-throughput scenarios. It’s very understandable that smaller customers wouldn’t want to handle that little monster.
I feel FB is solving a technical problem by alienating a bunch of their users with a terms change. Why not instead just build the right technical solution?
Still will be nice to have another opinion.
Does the term "business" include governments as well?
Of course I suspect Meta actually will listen on business calls while traditional phone companies will most likely only do so after a court order, but we put the bar much higher with digital services compared to regular phone calls.
[1] Advertising, and maybe political messages
By business I'm referring to WhatsApp business accounts.
But I couldn't find any confirmation. There is a WhatsApp business API that is from Facebook, but apparently you don't necessarily need to use it.
This means that when a message is decrypted by a recipient, that decryption is taking place within a Facebook service, rather than on an end user device.
Unfortunately, as you say, cynicism is a problem with anything linked to a company like Facebook/Meta that has earned a certain amount of distrust.