When it comes to evergreen social media, WhatsApp is a dominating social media platform. However, they raised many eyebrows when they decided to update their terms of use and privacy policy. According to the new policy, WhatsApp will start sharing your personal information with Facebook. All users will get a pop-up notification, and they’ll have to accept these terms by 8 February 2021.
After this update, people feared about their privacy. Moreover, many users were already considering other platforms like Telegram and Signal. But, WhatsApp has now clarified all kinds of privacy concerns. They tweeted that all your private messages, groups, and calls will remain encrypted. Neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can see your private messages. The new update in the privacy policy is related to Business Accounts of WhatsApp accounts rather than personal accounts.
WhatsApp’s clarification about the new policy
Moreover, they have explained that many businesses are now using WhatsApp to interact with their customers. Thus, this new privacy policy will use your interaction with Business Accounts for marketing purposes. These were the points that were clarified by WhatsApp:
- Neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can read your messages or any other personal information.
- Facebook and WhatsApp, both of them will remain unable to see your location either.
- WhatsApp will not share your contacts with Facebook.
- All WhatsApp groups will remain private.
- WhatsApp users can now set their messages to disappear.
In case any user does not want to share his/her interactions with business accounts, they can choose not to agree with their terms. However, doing so will result in losing your WhatsApp account.
After clearing all rumors and concerns, people are still not ready to trust them completely. The main reason behind it is their parent company Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s social platform doesn’t have a good record of maintaining its user’s privacy. Thus, the idea of switching to other social media apps is attracting many people.
