It seems that after Facebook has been put under pressure from privacy regulators across Europe, the WhatsApp application has stopped sharing user data with the popular social network.
According to The Financial Times, WhatsApp has suspended its policy last week in Germany and UK. Facebook and WhatsApp are now working with the European representatives to answer the concerns regarding the use of the data and a way to make the new feature an opt-in instead of forcing all users to share their mobile phone number with Facebook.
We remind you that back in October, The Article 29 Working Party, which is formed from the privacy leaders from each of the EU’s 28 nations, has warned Jan Koum, the CEO of WhatsApp, that it had some serious concerns regarding the changes that the application had in its terms of services.
Users were “warned” that their phone numbers, profile names, photos and online status (along other activities) will be shared with the parent company (Facebook) in order to test out some new features that will help them interact with businesses, such as: news regarding a cancelled flight from an airline, fraud notifications from a bank and more.
WhatsApp has added back then that the messages will remain secured by “end-to-end” encryption and nobody will be able to read them (not even Facebook or the WhatsApp staff), but privacy experts have continued to put pressure on both companies.
Last week, the UK’s Information Commissioner Office has confirmed that Facebook has stopped data collection from WhatsApp users that live in the UK. Well, it seems that this has changed and it has now expanded to users across Europe.
It’s not sure yet if Facebook will ever collect data from WhatsApp, but we are pretty sure that the company will try to work this out with the European representatives in order to find a way to continue doing it.
Leave a Reply