(Reuters) – Facebook Inc’s WhatsApp is delaying an update aimed at boosting business transactions on the platform after a storm of concerns from users who feared the messaging platform was diluting its privacy policy in the process.
WhatsApp users received a notification this month that they were preparing a new privacy policy and terms, and reserved the right to share some user data with the Facebook application.
This sparked global protests and a wave of new users for competing private messaging apps, including Telegram and Signal.
WhatsApp said on Friday that it would delay the launch of the new policy until May from February, that the update was focused on allowing users to send messages to businesses and that the update would not affect personal conversations, which will continue to be encrypted from side to side .
“This update does not expand our ability to share data with Facebook,” he said in a statement.
“Although not everyone buys with 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,” he said.
Facebook has been launching business tools on WhatsApp for the past year, as it moves to increase revenue from higher-growth units, such as WhatsApp and Instagram, while uniting e-commerce infrastructure across the company.
Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $ 19 billion in 2014, but has been slow to monetize it.
The application already shares certain categories of personal data, including the user’s phone number and IP address, with Facebook.
“We don’t keep records of who everyone is texting or calling. We also can’t see your shared location and we don’t share your contacts with Facebook, ”he said.
WhatsApp said in October that it would start offering in-app purchases via Facebook Shops and would offer companies using its customer service messaging tools the ability to store those messages on Facebook servers.
WhatsApp said at the time that chats with a company using the new hosting service would not be protected by the application’s end-to-end encryption.
Reporting by Katie Paul in San Francisco and Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Elizabeth Culliford; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Cynthia Osterman