U-Turn: WhatsApp Now Says It Does Not Share Your Data With Anyone, Says Chats With Friends And Family Safe
Pune, January 12, 2021: After facing massive criticism for its privacy policy update and competition from other messaging apps, WhatsApp has issued a clarification today.
“We want to address some rumors and be 100% clear we continue to protect your private messages with end-to-end encryption. Our privacy policy update does not affect the privacy of your messages with friends or family. We do NOT share data with Facebook”, WhatsApp tweeted.
It further added, “We recently updated our Privacy Policy and we have received many thoughtful questions. With some of the rumors going around, we want to answer some of the common questions we have received. We go to great lengths to build WhatsApp in a way that helps people communicate privately.
We want to be clear that the policy update does not affect the privacy of your messages with friends or family in any way. Instead, this update includes changes related to messaging a business on WhatsApp, which is optional, and provides further transparency about how we collect and use data.”
Soon after WhatsApp’s updated privacy policy started popping up on users’ screens, informing that the new policy will be effective from 8 February 2021– lakhs of users started weighing other options of Messengers. There was a quick shift/signing up of users to Messengers like Telegram and Signal in the last week.
