CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Sat Jan 16, 2021 9:10 pm More from the first link above:
This Was WhatsApp's Plan All Along
Shoshana Wodinsky
Yesterday 1:54PM
Even if you aren’t the type of person who peruses WhatsApp on a regular basis, chances are you’ve tried perusing its new privacy policy.

Emphasis on “tried.” The roughly 4,000-word tome fell under fire from countless WhatsAppers across the globe after the company told its users that they’ll be ejected from the platform unless they abide by these new terms. Some eagle-eyed critics quickly noticed that buried under the rest of the usual slop that comes with your average privacy policy, it seemed like the new terms mandated that WhatsApp now had the right to share supposedly personal data—like phone numbers or payment info—with its parent company, Facebook, along with fellow subsidiary Instagram.

Naturally, people lost it. Over the past week, tens of millions of people have apparently flooded off of WhatsApp and onto rival messaging platforms like Signal and Telegram. Elon Musk weighed in, as did Edward Snowden. Turkish authorities opened a probe into WhatsApp’s data-sharing practices, followed by Italy’s regional data authority doing the same. On Thursday, authorities in India, WhatsApp’s biggest market, filed a petition alleging that the new terms weren’t only a threat to personal privacy, but to national security as well.

What became very clear very quickly is that, while everyone agreed on being outraged, there was a bit of fuzziness on what they agreed to be outraged about.

The confusion was the natural result of WhatsApp’s bungled rollout of these new policies. By shoving a scary-sounding ultimatum in front of countless users, and by tying that ultimatum to a privacy policy that (I think we can all agree) is near-impossible to comprehend, the bulk of WhatsApp’s users were left assuming the worst: that Facebook could now read their WhatsApp messages, snoop through their entire contact list, and know every time you leave someone on “read” within the app. These rumors eventually reached WhatsApp Head Will Cathcart, who issued his own lengthy Twitter thread debunking the bulk of these claims, before WhatsApp proper did its own debunking in the form of an FAQ page.

In a shocking turn of events, WhatsApp’s attempt to set its own tarnished record straight was regarded as bullshit by its more vocal critics. And honestly, they had a point: This is WhatsApp we’re talking about. When an encrypted chat platform that’s been widely praised by people in the privacy and security space very rudely announces it’ll be sharing your data—any data—with a company like Facebook, you can understand why that would raise some hackles.

The thing is, in the years since WhatsApp co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton cut ties with Facebook for, well, being Facebook, the company slowly turned into something that acted more like its fellow Facebook properties: an app that’s kind of about socializing, but mostly about shopping. These new privacy policies are just WhatsApp’s—and Facebook’s—way of finally saying the quiet part out loud.

being Facebook, the company slowly turned into something that acted more like its fellow Facebook properties: an app that’s kind of about socializing, but mostly about shopping. These new privacy policies are just WhatsApp’s—and Facebook’s—way of finally saying the quiet part out loud.

Clemen wrote: ↑Tue Jan 19, 2021 6:04 pm In the us/Europe it isn’t really, at least yet. In places like India and Brazil, it is heavily used by businesses to interact and transact with users. You can purchase and pay directly in app in India for instance. IIRC, India has 400M active users, that’s about a fifth of their total worldwide downloads.
Obviously the privacy implications are rather far ranging for something like that.
For locales where there is high market penetration, and low regulation, it’s an analog to the Chinese Weibo.
This only pertains if you value your privacy, and how you believe privacy works, there are arguments both for and against.
Personally, I’m an outlier, I don’t use google anything, or Facebook, and location services have always been off on my phone. There’s no sim in my smartphone, I bought it used, it’s not registered to me, it is of course broadcasting its IMEI even in airplane mode.
Everyone makes their own choices, those are some of mine.