Institute of Marketing Communications India®

What you need to know about WhatsApp's New Privacy Policy

WhatsApp, the social messaging app has recently rolled out a new privacy policy which is supposed to be live from 8th February 2021.

 

But this update in privacy had raised many eyebrows and caused havoc in the social space regarding people’s safety of private data in the online space. This also led to the boom of another messaging app Signal, which has shot up as one of the most downloaded apps in the app store.

 

Post declaration of the new privacy update by Facebook-owned WhatsApp, people had raised concerns about their privacy and exposure of their family and friends data from WhatsApp to the public domain at Facebook.

 

However, in the midst of all this commotion, WhatsApp has released a detailed blog post which clarifies that the new update will not share private data of users or any sensitive information regarding location with Facebook. The blog post further clarified that only some of the business conversations will be readable by Facebook to be used for better advertising. The WhatsApp groups’ data will also remain private to the users and will not be shared for Facebook ads.

 

On their official Twitter handle, WhatsApp also shared that the new privacy update will not keep any record of the calls or message logs of its app users. They will not see or hear any user’s calls as well. There will be complete transparency from Whatsapp about how they collect and use the data of their users.

 

The data which will be shared by its parent company, Facebook will mostly comprise of the user’s account registration information, i.e. the phone number, service-related information, transaction data, and the way users interact with other businesses on the platform. Other data which will be collected by WhatsApp includes information about the mobile device, IP address the details mentioned in the “Information We Collect” section of their website’s Privacy Policy.

 

Post this disclosure by WhatsApp, it is predicted that users will get some relief in regards to their data privacy concern and they would need to accept the new privacy policy before 8th February, 2021 to continue using WhatsApp.


12-01-2021


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