WhatsApp announced on Friday a three-month delay on a new privacy policy originally scheduled to take effect on February 8 following widespread confusion over whether the new policy would require data sharing with Facebook.
The update does not actually affect data sharing with Facebook regarding user chats or other profile information; WhatsApp has repeatedly clarified that its update addresses business chats if a user talks to a company’s customer service platform through WhatsApp.
“We heard from so many people how much confusion there is around our recent update. There has been a lot of misinformation causing concern and we want to help everyone understand our principles and facts ”, wrote the company in a new post published today.
Since 2016, WhatsApp has shared certain information with Facebook, including your phone number, unless you are one of the few selected users who chose not to share data while the option was still available that year. WhatsApp, however, does not look at people’s chat messages or listen to their calls, and WhatsApp conversations are encrypted from end to end to protect against these abuses.
Despite this, a pop-up informing users about the new change included mention of how WhatsApp partners with Facebook, and also included an ultimatum instructing users to delete their account if they chose not to agree to the new terms. This gave people the idea that they were being transferred to new and more invasive terms.
The company released a separate blog post this week trying to clear up the confusion, and included a chart that specifies what information is protected and not shared when someone uses WhatsApp.
But several media reports highlighting the inclusion of a broad new language in the privacy policy (a language that WhatsApp says has been misinterpreted to imply mandatory data sharing) and misinformation on social media have aggregated into a total privacy reaction from WhatsApp . The result has been an increase in subscriptions to competitors for messages like Signal and Telegram.
Facebook executives, including Instagram boss Adam Mosseri and WhatsApp boss Will Cathcart, used Twitter to try to clear up the confusion, apparently with little success. Facebook’s weak privacy history and the fact that WhatsApp, over time, has turned its attention to monetizing the platform for its large international user base, has eroded confidence in the chat app, which in turn , had the effect of becoming a relatively mundane update in a worldwide controversy.
WhatsApp says it will now use this three-month delay to better communicate changes to its new policy and long-standing privacy practices around personal chats, location sharing and other sensitive data. “Now we are moving back the date when people will be asked to review and accept the terms,” says the blog post.
WhatsApp says that no one will lose access to the app unless they agree to the new terms of the service contract that communicated the changes earlier this month. “We’ll also do a lot more to clear up misinformation about how privacy and security work on WhatsApp. Next, we’ll gradually seek out people to review the policy at their own pace, before new business options become available on May 15, ”says the company.
WhatsApp says The Verge the policy will not change when it is released. The intent of the update is to communicate to users that messages with companies on WhatsApp can be stored on Facebook servers, which requires data sharing between the two companies and would allow Facebook to share this information between its main social network and Instagram for targeting ads and improving your digital commerce business. WhatsApp still intends to release the update on May 15 to coincide with the new business chat features it started viewing in October.
But the company hopes that the extra time will help to control the controversy and better improve its message about what is really changing.
“The update includes new options that people will have to send messages to a company on WhatsApp and offers more transparency about how we collect and use the data. Although not everyone buys a company on WhatsApp today, we think more people will choose to do so in the future and it is important that people know about these services ”, says the blog post. “This update does not expand our ability to share data with Facebook.”