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The European Consumer Association (BEUC) turned to the European Commission on Monday with a complaint against the Whatsapp messenger platform. “For several months, Whatsapp has been bombarding its users with aggressive messages to get them to accept the new terms of use and data protection guidelines,” said BEUC boss Monique Goyens. “But users don’t even know what they are accepting”. User data would be processed without sufficient consent, warned Goyens.
“That is why we are calling on the authorities to take quick action against Whatsapp to ensure that the rights of consumers are respected,” Goyens continued.
The complaint is directed against the “persistent, recurring and intrusive” notifications with which Whatsapp asks its users to accept the new user conditions. These messages put users under pressure and thus restricted their freedom of choice, warned the consumer advocates.
The new terms of use are also not explained clearly enough. It was “in principle impossible for users to understand clearly what consequences the new Whatsapp Terms of Use would have for their own privacy,” said BEUC. This lack of transparency is a breach of European consumer law.
The main criticism of the update of the WhatsApp Terms of Use is that user data is passed on to Facebook or third-party companies. Specifically, it is about account information such as name, telephone number or profile picture – chats, on the other hand, remain encrypted.
Whatsapp itself denies a renewed data exchange in the course of the update. However, according to its own statements, the messenger has been sharing information with Facebook for a long time anyway: such as the telephone number, certain device information such as the device ID and the operating system version as well as WhatsApp usage data. Outside the EU, some data is already being sent to Facebook for advertising purposes, among other things.
Source: AFP
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