Cari AI, the digital tool that allows you to improve your company’s customer service, carried out the webinar entitled, “Chatbots: WhatsApp vs Telegram”, in order to demystify and clarify all the doubts that have been generated as a result of the WhatsApp announcement about its privacy policy and data management.
Lately we have seen a massive exodus of WhatsApp users due to the announcement of a new data privacy policy. However, this has an undercurrent, says Ronald Melo, specialist in digital channels and architect of artificial intelligence products Cari AI. One of the antecedents of this digital phenomenon occurred at the end of last year in which Facebook received a lawsuit involving Messenger and WhatsApp for monopolistic practices.
Subsequently, on January 6, 2021, WhatsApp announced its new privacy policy, however, “this type of update is not rare, all messaging apps usually update their service policies every year according to the laws in the countries where they operate ”, considered the specialist.
The flaw that caused controversy is that Facebook made this announcement in the form of an ultimatum, categorically and did not provide users with more options.
Parallel to the announcement of the messaging app, Elon Musk became the richest person in the world and published a tweet calling on users to use Signal, which caused more controversy.
For the days following this event, more than 25 million new users were registered on Telegram, in addition to announcements that several public figures had opened an account on this channel.
Messaging apps
With the precedent and the controversy that WhatsApp caused, the Cari AI expert highlighted in the webinar, the strengths and weaknesses of several similar applications along with WhatsApp itself:
Signa: It is an app that came out in 2015 with high security and private standards, but it does not have a presence in Latin America.
Facebook Messenger: This app is safe, but it is the app that captures the most information from its users, to date it holds the second place in the world of registered users.
Telegram: One of the strengths of this application is the user experience (UX), since it has several visual components, security and privacy, and it does not monetize user conversations. In contrast, it has 500 million users, which limits its coverage.
Whatsapp: It is the number one messaging application worldwide, you can send HSM messages, which have the ability to be sent to people just by having a cell phone number. In addition, the application has a presence on almost every continent in the world.
On the other hand, it has weaknesses in its privacy, it monetizes the conversations in the business accounts, it limits its user experience functionalities and it announced an ad sales scheme that will be released soon.
Myths about WhatsApp
Speaking about the myths that have been created after WhatsApp’s announcement of its privacy policies, Ronald Melo pointed out that in his opinion, it is false that the application sends and shares private conversations to Facebook simply because it does not make financial sense.
He explained that this application records 100 billion messages a day and from an operational and financial point of view, it is not profitable to apply the technology of processing and understanding of natural language (NLP and NLU respectively, for its acronym in English) to the conversations. , and that also varies with respect to regions, countries and geographical areas just to know if someone is interested in buying a product. What WhatsApp does share with Facebook is metadata, which is information and details associated with a user and which is valued in the marketing industry, such as locations, commercial transactions, time and usability patterns of devices, etc. .
On the contrary, applications like Signal do not extract information, while Telegram only extracts the number of users and contacts. However, Facebook is the one that collects the most metadata from users, as well as other aspects of the application’s usability, the expert emphasized. “Since the announcement of the new WhatsApp policies was made, the company reported that it does not share conversations of any kind, but referred to how business accounts work, in which there is no end-to-end encryption, since there is a third party that can forward the messages to other companies for processing ”, he clarified.
In summary, WhatsApp is secure, but due to the monetization schemes that Facebook manages, it does not offer as high a privacy management as other applications, however, this does not compromise the personal conversations of users, Melo considered.
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“All applications are secure, however, not all are private,” said Melo and added: “In my personal opinion, the technological giants are not evil companies, but the order of their priorities is wrong, since their first objective is to get money and the second is the benefit of its users, hopefully the day will come when they reverse the order ”.
Regarding the use of messaging services in companies, he said that the more digital channels they use to provide their customer service, they will be able to serve more users and attract more customers. “Although a user is free to do what they want, a company that wants to give good customer service does not have this freedom, since it has the obligation to provide service through various channels, the important thing is not to force people to use an app if they don’t want to, “he concluded.
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