It will be interesting.
After a wave of controversy on its first attempt, WhatsApp is slowly re-introducing its new update to its personal privacy policy, which will see the app share more information with Facebook – but only with respect to specific actions. to the business within the messaging platform.
WhatsApp initially chose to postpone the change after strong user resistance, now WhatsApp users are once again alerted to the upcoming change with these new signals in the app.
As you may recall, in January, WhatsApp started the all-new update via more direct information in the app, which sparked a huge backlash from WhatsApp users who were concerned that the change might indicate that WhatsApp would quickly share their individual information with parent company Facebook, consisting of access to their personal messages, and that they were essentially required to accept the update, otherwise WhatsApp would delete their account.
Which is incorrect, on both counts, but the simple recommendation was enough to bring alternative messaging apps to the top of the download charts – Telegram, for example, added 25 million new users in just 3 days, while Signal and Viber have seen a huge resurgence of interest.
The backlash was overwhelming and enough to force Facebook to run full-page ads in newspapers to better explain the change, and then, as noted, go back entirely to give it more time to interact with the full ramifications of the update.
Ultimately, WhatsApp needs to make the switch to help with Facebook’s broader messaging e-commerce strategies, like allowing Facebook Pay and cross-app sign-in. So now it’s all over again.
And while it takes a much smoother technique this time around, the consequences of lowering the edit are pretty strong.
As WhatsApp noted:
“After a period of several weeks, the tip of [mise à jour de la politique de confidentialité personnelle] that individuals will get will eventually become persistent. At that time, you will come across limited functionality on WhatsApp until you accept the updates. This will not happen to all users at the same time. ”
These limitations, which will increase over time, will be as follows:
- Unable to access your mailing list
- Elimination of the ability to receive incoming calls or notifications
- Ultimately, WhatsApp will “stop sending messages and calls to your phone”
So while WhatsApp has assured that it won’t remove anyone who doesn’t accept the new upgrade, the app will be useless until you do. So really, it’s just semantics in that sense.
Growing penalties for non-compliance could trigger further angst among WhatsApp users, who could see alternative messaging tools getting a boost again. WhatsApp is hoping that its large scale will be enough to keep most users from worrying – if all of your contacts and chats are already in WhatsApp and the right people can’t be bothered to restart their networks in a new app, that will reduce any significant loss of use.
Which will probably happen. While individuals are concerned about privacy, as we’ve seen time and time again, benefits are usually a much higher consideration for the more understanding people, and if your friends don’t change, there is not much interest in changing either.
This is probably not necessarily a bad thing. As WhatsApp has repeatedly said:
“Updating the policy does not affect the privacy of your messages with friends or family in any way. ”
The update only concerns interactions with selected services in the app, which may choose to use information from those interactions for advertising or other interaction functions. Although this will also, as kept in mind, allow WhatsApp to offer more streaming payment choices, while also working on Facebook’s broader messaging combination strategy.
In that sense, it’s not uncommon or even really controversial. upgrade in the general plan. This in a way reduces WhatsApp’s overarching goal of personal privacy, which unsurprisingly freaked out a lot of people.
Whether that’s enough to get more people to quit the app altogether, we’re now going to wait and see.
–
