After the ridiculous privacy policy introduced by WhatsApp aka Facebook, users from all across the globe have shown their rage and even started uninstalling it. Signal has popped as the most preferred messaging platform recently as users have become concerned about their privacy.
Today, WhatsApp has addressed all these concerns about their new policies and has clarified a lot of things via their official FAQ page:
We can’t see your private messages or hear your calls, and neither can Facebook: Neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can read your messages or hear your calls with your friends, family, and co-workers on WhatsApp. Whatever you share, it stays between you. That’s because your personal messages are protected by end-to-end encryption. We will never weaken this security and we clearly label each chat so you know our commitment. Learn more about WhatsApp security here.
We don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging or calling: While traditionally mobile carriers and operators store this information, we believe that keeping these records for two billion users would be both a privacy and security risk and we don’t do it.
We can’t see your shared location and neither can Facebook: When you share your location with someone on WhatsApp, your location is protected by end-to-end encryption, which means no one can see your location except the people you share it with.
We don’t share your contacts with Facebook: When you give us permission, we access only the phone numbers from your address book to make messaging fast and reliable, and we don’t share your contacts lists with the other apps Facebook offers.
Groups remain private: We use group membership to deliver messages and to protect our service from spam and abuse. We don’t share this data with Facebook for ads purposes. Again, these private chats are end-to-end encrypted so we can’t see their content.
You can set your messages to disappear: For additional privacy, you can choose to set your messages to disappear from chats after you send them. Learn more in this Help Center article.
You can download your data: You can download and see what information we have on your account right from within the app. Learn more in this Help Center article.
A lot of things has been been answered but people are still more frightened than ever, although WhatsApp has its own identity but having been owned by Facebook a lot of things have changed. Though WhatsApp seems to deny accessing a lot of data but still they are taking more info from you than platforms like Signal and Telegram.
