Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone’s article: Recent developments with social media apps and messaging have caused a lot of confusion. After consulting with professionals, here are some points that can help clarify things.
By the rabbi Mordechai Lightstone – Director of Tech Tribe
With recent developments in social media and messaging apps – especially Whatsapp with its change in the Terms of Service – several people have come to me to clarify what exactly is going on.
And there is a ton of confusion out there. So I checked with the security and privacy professionals in the Tech Tribe community what the best practices with WhatsApp should be. Although, ultimately, based on my personal reading of things, the following is an analysis of the most important points:
The update of WhatsApp rules is not linked to current political debates.
There is considerable discussion now about recent political developments and how they intersect with social media. These questions can be / seem very important. But they are not connected to the WhatsApp update.
This is nothing new – WhatsApp has been linked to Facebook since 2016.
Two years after acquiring WhatsApp, Facebook started integrating the app into its ecosystem – sharing metadata and other details like that with its other apps. Facebook is not free, it makes money from selling ads and sells ads based on the large amount of information you share with it. (That’s why you get birthright ads)
Basically, all technology companies today work this way. Since 2016, WhatsApp had this integration. The ability to make a single opt-out ended with this new update. Some changes to privacy terms also apply to people who interact with companies on WhatsApp Business – family and group chats remain unchanged.
Facebook is not reading your messages.
Whatsapp continues to use end-to-end encryption. (He uses the Signal encryption system) So his messages cannot be seen by Mark Zuckerberg. They can be seen by someone looking over your shoulder.
If you really don’t want to share information with Facebook, deleting WhatsApp is not enough!
Since all of these apps collect mountains of basic information about us – remove WhatsApp without removing Instagram, Facebook, Messenger etc. it will not have the desired effect of preventing Facebook from collecting all the juicy data you provide – and sending messages in those applications is not encrypted from end to end.
Since we are talking – there are many other security features:
Google, Amazon, Apple, that credit card you have to maximize your points. . . they are collecting TONS of information about you. Did you know that Google can create a map of where you are going based on the use of your phone? Target managed to find out that a girl was pregnant before she told the family. Are you using two-factor authentication and strong passwords? (preferably something long and unique for each site – or with a service like Lastpass). There is a lot out there that is worth knowing that is of direct importance to your online security. Much of this, in my opinion, is much more important than providing data to Facebook.
There are definitely stronger options:
Signal is highly recommended by experts. It is always important, as there are several application options. If privacy on the web is your thing, there are interesting options to investigate. Telegram does not use its environmental information to sell ads, but it is considered less secure than Signal and WhatsApp.
But for your messaging needs, WhatsApp is great for most people:
In fact, WhatsApp works well for almost all forms of communication you do on it. It has end-to-end encryption and is aligned with the data sharing that basically all the services we use receive from us. There were no new developments in any of this, that is, new reasons for shutting it down.