WhatsApp is Facebook is Instagram is No Privacy Whatsoever

The just announced WhatsApp EULA update has far reaching consequences for our privacy. It wants us to agree to share our WhatsApp data with other Facebook lines of business as well as third parties, otherwise it will stop working on Feb 8th, 2021.

The Next Web has more details: https://thenextweb.com/facebook/2021/01/06/heres-what-that-whatsapp-privacy-policy-pop-up-means-for-you/.

As far as I can remember, that was the exact reason why European Commission has slapped a 120 million USD fine on Facebook, back in 2017. While pushing through the acquisition of WhatsApp, Facebook lied to EU authorities about protecting WhatsApp accounts from access by other Facebook businesses. More about it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/eu-to-fine-facebook-over-whatsapp-acquisition-1495047856.

Apparently that fine wasn’t enough. EU should have stopped the merger right away… I hope this time the authorities will show some more teeth. GDPR, anyone?

Meanwhile, please feel free to find me on Signal, which I happily use since years now :-) Signal is free, secure, completely open source (unlike Telegram!) and does not siphon away or sell your data to any third parties! It comes with a fantastic set of desktop client apps for Windows, MacOS and Linux, which allow video and audio calls to any other Signal users. Download Signal here.