With each passing day, we seem to have less and less privacy, and the crazy/sad part is that we willfully give it away to social media. The newest reminder that your personal information is being broadcast on the internet comes to us via SnapChat.
On Friday, WhatsApp updated their terms and conditions. This is significant because this is the first time that WhatsApp has updated their terms and conditions since Facebook acquired the cross-platform mobile messaging app four years ago. One of the new terms that stood out for negative reasons was that WhatsApp would share your personal information with Facebook.
“We plan to share some information with Facebook and the Facebook family of companies that will allow us to coordinate more and improve experiences across our services and those of Facebook and the Facebook family,” the announcement stated.
That personal information includes your phone number, as well as the last time you used WhatsApp.
The WhatsApp FAQ page details the reasons for the change:
- We will be able to more accurately count unique users.
- We can better fight spam and abuse.
- If you are a Facebook user, you might see better friend suggestions and more relevant ads on Facebook.
I could be wrong, but I think the key word here is “relevant ads.”
They do say that what you post on WhatsApp will not be shared on Facebook:
Nothing you share on WhatsApp, including your messages, photos, and account information, will be shared onto Facebook or any of the Facebook family of apps for others to see. This means, for example, although some information will be shared with Facebook (such as your phone number), that information will not be seen by other people on Facebook. In addition, when you and your contacts use the latest version of our app, your messages are end-to-end encrypted by default. When your messages are end-to-end encrypted, only the people you are messaging with can read them – not WhatsApp, Facebook, or anyone else.
If this is something that bothers you, there is a way to stop it. You can opt out of this new situation by doing the following:
- Open WhatsApp on your phone.
- On Android, tap the action overflow button in the upper right corner and select Settings. On iOS, tap the Settings tab in the lower right corner.
- Select Account.
- Tap the check mark to the right of Share my account info.
- To disable the feature, tap Don’t Share.
- The pop-up that appears reads, “If you tap ‘Don’t Share’, you won’t be able to change this in the future.” And they mean it. After you follow through with this action, the option will no longer be visible from the Account section of Settings and there is no turning back.
So there you have it. You can keep your phone number from being used.