Anyone dare comment on this? I honestly can’t believe a single point of it, but does FB/WA really dare to lie that insolently? Also expanded and explained here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/technology/whatsapp-data.html
I mean… how would Whatsapp generate money if they do not get any data?
No comment on FB latest public realations The founder of Whatsapp has provided some pretty good inside baseball from his dealings with their goals to exploit WA user data via metadata linking. FB maybe can’t read your messages (unless someone sends them to a moderator via new Report functionality) but they do use metadata to exploit users.
In perhaps the most telling tidbit of the interview, Acton reveals that even before the WhatsApp acquisition had been cleared he was carefully coached by Facebook to tell European regulators it would be “really difficult” for it to combine WhatsApp and Facebook user data.
“I was coached to explain that it would be really difficult to merge or blend data between the two systems,” Acton said.
An ‘impossible conjoining’ that Facebook subsequently, miraculously went on to achieve, just two years later, which later earned it a $122M fine from the European Commission for providing incorrect or misleading information on the original filing. (Facebook has maintained that unintentional “errors” were to blame.)
After the acquisition had been cleared Acton said he later learned that elsewhere in Facebook there were indeed “plans and technologies to blend data” between the two services — and that specifically it could use the 128-bit string of numbers assigned to each phone to connect WhatsApp and Facebook user accounts.
Phone-number matching is another method used to link accounts — and sharing WhatsApp users’ phone numbers with the parent group was a change pushed onto users via the 2016 update to WhatsApp’s terms and conditions.
(Though Facebook’s linking of WhatsApp and Facebook accounts for ad targeting purposes remains suspended in Europe, after regulatory push-back.)
Acton said Facebook also sought “broader rights” to WhatsApp users data under the new terms of service — and claims he and Koum pushed back and reached a compromise with Facebook management.
The ‘compromise’ being that the clause about ‘no ads’ would remain — but Facebook would get to link accounts to power friend suggestions on Facebook and to offer its advertising partners better targets for ads on Facebook. So really they just bought themselves (and their users) a bit more time.
but does FB/WA really dare to lie that insolently?
Thought exercise: Would FB/WA have any reason not to lie? Or better put, any incentive to not lie?
Well, they can be fined for false advertising and misleading customers, at least in the EU.
And these statements may very well be true in the EU, because there they have to comply with the GDPR and have already been prohibited from sharing data with Facebook.Obviously, if you sue for misleading customers or well, anything, you kind of want some proof for it, which you’re very unlikely to have here, so they would still be in relative safety.
I also really can’t stand these “we don’t do x, y and z” lists, because there’s an infinite number of ways that this could be twisted.
What if WhatsApp doesn’t share data with Facebook, but instead shares it with Instagram or some third-party, which then routes it towards Facebook?
Obviously, being technically correct isn’t enough to get regulators off of your ass, but yeah, that’s just one of many ways that they could still be doing things.People often read these lists as if a person is just making examples of things that they’re not doing and then they assume that they must not either be doing similarly bad or worse things.
But Facebook can totally be doing anything that’s not on this list. For all I know, they’re selling my data on the dark web right now. (I do hope, there’s some law or their privacy policy that disallows this particular extreme, but I honestly wouldn’t know.)
I wonder if Facebook & WhatsApp took us for total idiots. The moment they had set their eyes on WhatsApp, all they saw was data! data! data! and loads of it to make money from.
but does FB/WA really dare to lie that insolently?
It’s Facebook, what do you think?
I love that the only way they give you to don’t get cookies on their sites is to deactivate cookies in the Navigator Itself.
normally I would be inclined to believe, but since it’s Facebook I’m not gonna believe a single goddamn word. ZUCC is an awful human being and I hate every single product he owns
I’m pretty sure Facebook has disobeyed their own privacy policy before, which is illegal, but for a company that big, whatever fines they incur from that is just business expenses.
