Give us ya Data!!

There is a saying that goes like, “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product” and Facebook is one of the companies that take this motto very seriously, WhatsApp’s new policy changes just prove the point. So, in the past few days, if you are using WhatsApp you might have seen this notification or prompt that says the privacy policies of WhatsApp are gonna be updated and you need to accept the terms and conditions of their new policy. Whether it is optional you ask, Nah-hah Mark doesn’t operate that way, if you fail to accept these new policies before Feb 8, 2021, I guess(Future akash here, this is pushed to May, 2021 now) you won’t be able to use WhatsApp anymore.

As you know, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, and, Facebook and privacy are two things that have nothing to do with each other. So, with these new policies, I dug a little deeper to know what’s the fuss is all about, the findings may shock you. They can’t track our messages, since WhatsApp is end to end encrypted (at least they say so), so I wondered what else they can get from our WhatsApp account, you know what, it is basically everything else. I watched this video from Beebom and according to them, WhatsApp collects data such as what device we are using, whether it is an android or an iPhone, what model it is, which time zone are you in, and your account details like how many groups you are joined, what are all those groups, your profile pictures, your about info, thanks to WhatsApp payments they can track those transactions you make through WhatsApp, your status updates, how you are using your WhatsApp like when is your last seen, how frequent you are using, and if that is not crazy enough they can even track your battery percentage and your signal strength too!!! And all these data can be shared with Facebook according to the updated privacy policy.

So, agreeing to these policies will grant WhatsApp permission to figure out everything about you, what you like, what you don’t like, your contacts, your addresses, and everything. These data will be shared to Facebook then, which has huge data centers to store all their user’s data, and Facebook will share these data to third-party companies, that are willing to know about you, which I guarantee there are many out there.

The new policy changes also mention, the relevant information exchange will help to include ads and offers for the users, which basically means if you share a link to any product through WhatsApp, be ready to see a lot of ads relating to that product for the next couple of days. And these changes will affect when you’re interacting with a business account. Anyways, Facebook will say all these things is to improve and help small businesses, and we all know they are just referring themselves here.

There are several replacements for WhatsApp, one of them is Signal. Signal is free, has strong encryption, works on all platforms, even available for desktops, has WhatsApp like features like voice calls and video calls. There is Telegram, though encryption is possible we have to manually enable it, yea but anyway we use Telegram more like a replacement for Torrents. There is one called Threema, which is super secure, in fact, the most privacy-focused of all, you don’t even have to share your mobile number to use it, the encryption is so strong that it even encrypts the files you share and your status updates too! The very unfortunate thing is that it is a paid app (oopsiee).

So, what do you think, should we uninstall WhatsApp and go for a new app? Should we abandon all Facebook-related accounts? Or you think ‘Fakk it! There’s no such thing called privacy in this data-driven world’ Anyways, regardless, thank you for reading.......

Digitally Yours ✌️