Last week Whatsapp rolled out a privacy banner that will share all of their data with Facebook. This pop-up message to users is delivered in some regions, including India, asking them to accept the new privacy regulations or they will risk losing their accounts. It is mandatory for the whatsapp users to accept these terms and conditions in order to retain their WhatsApp account information or else they will end up losing.

Whatsapp parent company is Facebook.

Now to sum up all the questions that might be in your mind after seeing so many posts and videos. And you must be thinking that I have done something wrong in accepting the policy.

Are my messages safe ?? OR ARE MY MESSAGES BEING SHARED TO FACEBOOK??

The privacy policy remains the same for the personal chats i.e. it is end to end encrypted and no third party can cipher them. In a statement, WhatsApp said: “The update does not change WhatsApp’s data sharing practices with Facebook and does not impact how people communicate privately with friends or family… WhatsApp remains deeply committed to protecting people’s privacy.”

ARE MY MESSAGES BEING STORED SOMEWHERE?

No, your messages are just stored on your device. How? According to the privacy policy, once a message is delivered, it is “deleted” from the company’s servers. WhatsApp stores a message only when it “cannot be delivered immediately” — the message can then stay on its servers “for up to 30 days” in an encrypted form as WhatsApp continues to try to deliver it. If undelivered even after 30 days, the message is deleted.

IF NOTHING IS AT RISK, THEN WHY THERE IS SO MUCH HYPE??

Because there is a data exchange with Facebook which is taking place.

WHAT KIND OF DATA??

WhatsApp shares the following information with Facebook and its other companies: account registration information (phone number), transaction data (WhatsApp now has payments in India), service-related information, information on how you interact with others (including businesses), mobile device information, and IP address. It is also collecting more information at a device hardware level now.

Since, you might have seen “Rooms” in whatsapp which is just a small example of integration of Facebook to Whatsapp.

ARE MY MESSAGES ALSO INVOLVED IN THIS DATA TRASFER??

Since personal messages are encrypted end to end, they wont be involved in this data. While other data that is shared above are transferred and shared to facebook. Which might in future brings ads to whatsapp.

Do we have to accept the privacy policy?

Its totally upto you, as a software this is the standard practice to share the changes that they have done in terms of privacy policy and get consent of the users. If you don’t want to you can opt out and can switch to other apps like TELEGRAM or SIGNAL. Which are in great name now.

Even Elon Musk tweeted to switch to SIGNAL.

This will be interesting to see, what will happen next, will people start moving to other apps or whatsapp will rollback these changes.