WhatsApp is forging ahead with a new privacy policy that will expand Facebook's grip on consumer data, despite pressure from users and lawmakers to reverse course — intensifying alarm about Silicon Valley writing its own rules of the road on data in the absence of regulation in the U.S.
Under the new rules, set to take effect Saturday, users must agree to let Facebook use data from their interactions with businesses on WhatsApp to target ads across its platforms.
The changes were set to take effect in February, but after widespread consumer backlash to the announcement — which prompted a flood of angry tweets like “stop Facebook from using you” and drove many to alternatives like Signal and Telegram — the company delayed the roll-out. Critics have since cried foul on Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge from 2014, when Facebook bought WhatsApp, to ensure his company would “absolutely not” change WhatsApp’s approach to user data and that the social messaging app would operate autonomously.
“We can't keep letting the largest companies in the world, founded in the United States, break their promises,” Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), who has led a push by some House Democrats to force Facebook to reverse course, said in an interview. “Facebook should uphold their promise, and that of WhatsApp's founders, to prioritize the privacy of their users.”
The conflict highlights the mounting struggle on the part of Congress to check the power of tech companies, even when lawmakers’ constituents are up in arms.
Technology companies are growing and innovating faster than laws and leaders in Washington can move, and it’s unclear how the new administration and Congress will catch up. Lawmakers’ prolonged impasse on a national privacy law has left the door open for the most influential players in the tech world — including Facebook, Apple and Google — to self-regulate and write their own playbooks for how data can be shared across companies and around the world.
WhatsApp and Facebook have long exchanged valuable metadata — “data about the data,” as Trahan put it — which offers insight into consumers’ behavior and is extremely important for advertisers. But the messaging app’s growth in the U.S. early in the pandemic, coupled with it being tangled in antitrust suits and probes around the world, has drawn a new level of scrutiny to the way data on its more than two billion users is shared across the Facebook ecosystem.
Facebook’s 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp is now a main focus of antitrust suits by the FTC and attorneys general from nearly every state. Those cases, which allege that Facebook bought WhatsApp to prevent it from growing into a rival that would siphon off its users, are seeking to force Facebook to spin off WhatsApp and Instagram. Brazil and the European Union are also pursuing action against Facebook related to WhatsApp’s handling of user data.
And now users are being asked to give Facebook more power to use information about their shopping habits on WhatsApp for advertising and marketing purposes.
The company has stressed that the actual content of personal messages remains end-to-end encrypted and not visible to Facebook or advertisers.
Public interest groups say that Facebook is misleading users by playing up the encryption protections.
“This is not about protecting privacy, this integration; this is exactly the opposite,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of advocacy group Center for Digital Democracy. “This is about exposing the tens of millions of WhatsApp users who use it for vital communications daily, to allow the company to more effectively track and target them with advertising and marketing to bolster its bottom line.”
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