Whatsapp hands out against Telegram with the adoption of a new privacy policy

• Whatsapp would like to introduce new data protection guidelines again.
• The messenger app caused a kind of data protection panic among users as early as January through new guidelines.
• Many users switched to better encrypted, competing messaging service providers such as Signal and Telegram due to the data protection panic on Whatsapp.

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A month after changes in the privacy policy caused panic, Whatsapp is now trying to get users back on its side. In January, the company sent users a notification asking them to agree to an updated privacy policy, otherwise their access to the app would be blocked.

This privacy policy really only concerned how the platform would handle data from messages sent to business user accounts in the future. However, many users thought that this would mean that their data would be increasingly shared with the Whatsapp parent company Facebook.

Whatsapp thereupon postponed the approval period for this new privacy policy. The company also published one on Thursday Blogpost, in which it stated that it would again ask users to agree to these new guidelines. Instead of a pop-up notification, this time around, WhatsApp will just display a banner at the top of the app that users can click for a more in-depth explanation of the exact changes.

Whatsapp criticizes supposedly safer competitors like Telegram

In this blog post, Whatsapp also swipes at competing apps, which have won an enormous number of users after the data protection panic last month: “In these times, we understand that some people try other apps to see what they are have to offer. We’ve seen some of our competitors try to get away with claiming they can’t see users’ messages – if an app doesn’t offer end-to-end encryption by default, it means they can read your messages “.

Whatsapp did not name the said competitors, but it is known that the two largest messaging apps that benefited from the privacy panic in January were Signal and Telegram. Signal’s downloads rose in the four days following the panic-inducing Whatsapp notification 4,200 percent, with 7.5 million new downloads. Telegram could be within 72 hours 25 million new users win, exceeding the 500 million download mark.

While Signal is end-to-end encrypted by default, this is not the case with Telegram. Whatsapp appeared to refer to these services indirectly in its blog post, saying, “Other apps say they are better because they have even less information than WhatsApp. We believe people are looking for apps that are both reliable and secure, even if that requires Whatsapp to have some data. “

Signal and Telegram collect less metadata about users than Whatsapp, what they say out loud Makes experts better messenger services for people who want to protect their privacy.

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This text has been translated from English. You can find the original here.

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