It outlines that WhatsApp does not share your contacts with Facebook for its own use, and there are “no plans to do so”. WhatsApp says data is only shared with Facebook for purposes such as preventing spam, and not for advertising. You can then start extrapolating inferences or relationships and build social graphs.” This isn’t just, ‘X is on Y’s phone’, it is ‘X is on Y’s phone and they are messaging each other every evening at around 8pm for an hour’. “When you look at metadata, it turns out a lot of the time you don’t even need message content, because patterns of activity tell you a lot about someone. Metadata is a valuable tool to analyse the contacts between people, says Rowenna Fielding, founder and director of privacy consultancy Miss IG Geek. But six months later WhatsApp is still by far the most popular messaging app, with two billion users. Yet the policy change and resulting backlash highlighted the large amounts of data WhatsApp can collect since its 2014 acquisition by Facebook. This wasn’t the case: the update to WhatsApp’s policy covers the way people communicate with businesses, and the data shared with Facebook remains the same.

The uproar came after millions of people misinterpreted WhatsApp’s new terms to mean more data would be shared with its parent Facebook. Others switched to Telegram, which was downloaded 11m times during the week following the privacy update. During the week after the announcement – which saw WhatsApp demand users accept a new policy or delete their accounts – downloads of rival Signal surged by 35 times to 8.8 million causing its servers to crash. At the start of 2021, a poorly communicated privacy policy change spurred a mass exodus from Facebook-owned WhatsApp.

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