Facebook's WhatsApp Data Gambit Faces Federal Privacy Complaint (vice.com) 94
Sam Gustin, writing for Motherboard: Facebook's decision to begin harvesting data from its popular WhatsApp messaging service provoked a social media uproar on Thursday, and prompted leading privacy advocates to prepare a federal complaint accusing the tech titan of violating US law. On Thursday morning, WhatsApp, which for years has dined out on its reputation for privacy and security, announced that it would begin sharing user phone numbers with its Menlo Park-based parent company in an effort "to improve your Facebook ads and products experiences." Consumer privacy advocates denounced the move as a betrayal of WhatsApp's one billion users -- users who had been assured by the two companies that "nothing would change" about the messaging service's privacy practices after Facebook snapped up the startup for a whopping $19 billion in 2014. "WhatsApp users should be shocked and upset," Claire Gartland, Consumer Protection Counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a leading US consumer advocacy group, told Motherboard. "WhatsApp obtained one billion users by promising that it would protect user privacy. Both Facebook and WhatsApp made very public promises that the companies would maintain a separation. Those were the key selling points of the deal."
Those were marketing claims (Score:2)
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Not true. But you're entitled to your dumb opinion. The problem is most of these tech companies own an illegal monopoly on markets and get away with it so you're right. But your wrong that if a company changes TOS on you, if they impede your freedoms, income, etc you not only have a legal claim but your also entitled to damage, its why we call it the "justice system".
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I have my own justice system.
I read this story and then instantly uninstalled the app.
Re: Those were marketing claims (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yes, I did. While I realize the cows are out of the barn on some of my data, I can at least stop using the app, decrease their user base by one, and post about it online to voice my displeasure and dissuade others from using it.
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Good for you. At least they won't collect anything more from you. Try also sending them a formal registered letter requesting that they immediately delete all data associated with your account. Even if they don't, that can still prove to be useful in some future hypothetical litigation.
Regarding the letter, maybe EFF can help you get started by providing a template or maybe they already have a standard letter for such cases.
Re: Those were marketing claims (Score:2)
I don't think any company has a monopoly on any particular market, except maybe Microsoft when it comes to desktop systems. But nobody cares about that anymore now that mobile has taken the show, which in the US is a clear duopoly, though Google *may* be considered a monopoly outside of the US here.
As far as the social, chatty apps, I really doubt that WhatsApp has anywhere close to a monopoly.
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> As far as the social, chatty apps, I really doubt that WhatsApp has anywhere close to a monopoly.
It certainly has in large parts of Europe and South America. It was the first usable replacement of sms, which was kept very expensive in some countries by the telco's. In The Netherlands, all others are insignificant compared to Whatsapp. There, the largest telco wanted at one time to introduce a special more expensive data contract that allowed one to use Whatsapp and the like (it would be blocked on othe
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It's hard for me to hate facebook since I don't use any of their products with any regularity.
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Capitalism is supposed to provide consumers with *choices*. Yet if a person's friends are all on Facebook my choice is already made for me.
It does, and it has succeeded at providing those choices. There's an almost endless number of ways to use the internet to stay in contact with your friends and family. Everything from (yes) FB, to email, to a million kinds of IM, to ... shit, just sharing files over an sshfs mount. If you choose to use Facebook, don't bitch about your choice. I choose not to use it. I never have. I never well. Yet, I've been using the internet to interact with friends since not only before FB, but before the web ca
Re: Those were marketing claims (Score:1)
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Re: Those were marketing claims (Score:1)
Yeah but those people that are not including you are clearly not your friends, and are publicly lazy enoug to not care about the fact that lots of people do not use Facebook. And you are suffering from classic fomo. Just stand firm.
In the past people would send physical invitations, if you had a homeless friend, you'd hunt them out. I don't have Facebook and never will, people have eventually gotten use to the fact I'm missing from events they wanted me at and now realise they will have to email or ring me
Re:Those were marketing claims (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. Including the magic clause "[company] may rewrite the terms of service from time to time, and it's the users responsibility to check the website periodically [...]" solves all future problems.
I always believed that no court in the universe will find this valid. Are you sure it's allowed in the US?
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If one side can do that, why can't the other? I occasionally rewrite the terms and it's up to them to check my website to see if I've changed them.
Pray (Score:3, Funny)
that I do not alter it further.
Why is this news? (Score:1, Troll)
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No problem here (Score:5, Interesting)
They both had their fingers crossed when they made the privacy promises. But seriously, anyone who thought FB wasn't going to harvest data at some point from a company they bought was seriously mistaken.
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Yeah. Promise made in 2014? Two years is basically how long it takes for a business to decide "forever" is up and the statement/contract/promise no longer applies. I learned that twenty years ago when many of my "fixed rate for life" service deals expired around 48 months, and the companies would just say "we have no record of such a program" and refuse to honor it.
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Mod parent up.
Came here to say exactly this. We cannot afford to blindly accept EULAs anymore. Not that anyone wants to read 32 pages of legalese for every 1,000-lines of code app that comes along, but we now have to continuously monitor EULAs and TOSs for any deviation. And if we don't like them, and don't want to accept, are we honestly going to find alternatives with user-friendly licenses?
It's like switching banks or cable companies, but worse. It can be such a pain in the ass to switch, but how are you
Re:No problem here (Score:4, Interesting)
Last year I got a mortgage for a commercial property, and was pleasantly surprised by the terms and conditions: written in very plain and succinct language, and especially lacking in those unbelievable run-on sentences found in regular legalese. It is possible to write agreements that can actually be read and understood. Time to make that a requirement if companies want to have them legally enforced.
Re: No problem here (Score:1)
Don't stop at EULAs. Laws should be clear and concise as well. Strict rules on their length and format would be beneficial to society.
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And why not? Facebook exists to make money.
Facebook doesn't exist as a charity to provide a free platform for you to show grandma pictures of your lunch. We've all known that Facebook invades every bit of privacy that you allow it to, it absorbs every sliver of information you wittingly or unwittingly provide it.
That's the cost of dealing with Facebook. If you use Facebook you give them every right to collect whatever information on you that they choose. In many cases, Facebook knows more about you tha
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And why not? Facebook exists to make money.
you and many others may think so. maybe you are right.
but maybe, just maybe, its all a scam and totally owned by the government as a way to get around *direct* spying on citizens.
google, MS and even apple included. to be a big player in the US, you have to follow some rules, especially the ones you will never read about or be able to point to in print.
we're in a post-snowden understanding of things; and yet there is still so much more that we don't know about the
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If Facebook went to the original WhatsApp business model ($1/year) and swore under penalty of dissolution that they wouldn't sell, disburse, or look at user data, I'd sign right up. They'd make a billion dollars a year! Who has access to the internet to the degree that FB is useful to them and can't afford a dollar a year?
But instead we have all this murkiness with adverts and data vending and TOS and outright lies.
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And it would take 19 years to recover the purchase cost.
--
All men having power ought to be mistrusted -- James Madison
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I'm not talking about WhatsApp. I'm talking Facebook proper.
Surprise!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people saw this coming when WhatsApp was sold.
How do you think Facebook where going to recoup the money? By turning their users into a product they can sell of course.
Surprised?
You shouldn't be, this how it works with social platforms; you aren't a user - you are a product.
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mandatory (Score:4, Funny)
Repace WhatsApp with Signal (Score:2)
Perhaps Facebook can tell us what Better User Experience they can create by mining the phone number of private, encrypted text messages?
I've found that by replacing WhatsApp with Signal I have a far better user experience, namely my private communications remain private. I've already removed Facebook from my phone, I can use my laptop for the occasional checking up on what family and friends are doing
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I wish there was a communication app that is both secure and widely used and DOES NOT REQUIRE A CRIPPLED COMPUTER (aka smartphone)
Both whatsapp and signal require a smartphone as relay for their desktop version
Re: Repace WhatsApp with Signal (Score:1)
Wickr: https://www.wickr.com/personal [wickr.com]
Inter-connection (Score:2)
Well, if the federal government forced on messaging systems a requirement to interchange with other messaging systems, then some of this may be reduced? Back in the 20th century this was done for the voice-landline networks and in many ways has resulted in the only non-fragmented, multi-vendor, communications system we have today. GSMA was formed because of the fragmentation of the analogue cellular networks at the time, but inherited to a certain extent the regulatory requirements to interconnect.
XMPP held
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I hope not, because then they would also demand it to be vulnerable to lawfull interception.
I paid for WahtsApp (Score:5, Insightful)
Hope a paid alternative to WhatsApp emerges.
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As I already sold my soul to Google, I will keep using Hangouts.
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WTF are they proposing to improve exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Their alleged claim of wanting to "improve your Facebook ads and products experiences" is pure bullshit... while this might be obvious to anyone who knows about Facebook's track record, the claim does not even withstand remotely objective scrutiny.
Assume just for a moment that their claim of wanting to improve the user experience were true....Consider that Whatsapp has no information about the content of any messages sent between users, so any content within the messages that are sent cannot be harvested to generate any kind of targeted advertising, the *only* thing that they have are names and phone numbers, and who is sending messages to whom, with no basis for understanding why beyond anything that might have been communicated out of band directly to Whatsapp. So since Whatsapp has no information about its users that can be used to actually generate any kind of "improved advertising experience" for its users, the assumption that this is what they actually are trying to do cannot possibly be correct.
There is nothing remotely tenable I can see about the notion that this could even somehow theoretically create an improved experience for the end user, and Facebook's claims that it would do so would seem to be wholly transparent lies.
Re:WTF are they proposing to improve exactly? (Score:4, Informative)
When they talk about the "user experience" they mean someone who is buying ads, not the person who is posting "Look what Hillary Trump said last night" every day. Think in terms of Facebook's customers.
Knowing who is talking to whom is an important part of Facebook's marketing. Look at how Facebook targets [washingtonpost.com] and consider item #19 in that article. It's not just about who you are, it's about who you know. Whether you think this is a good idea for Facebook or not, it is what they do.
User A and user B are friends in real life, use Whatsapp, and have Facebook accounts -- but they're not "friends" on Facebook (maybe they only use Facebook for work, or something like that). (Or maybe they don't have Facebook accounts, but Facebook has profiles on them gathered by "like" buttons, and has some way to deliver ads to at least one of them.) They communicate with each other using Whatsapp. This lets Facebook connect the two profiles, even though within Facebook alone, they are unconnected. The result: Now user A can see shopping ads for user B's upcoming birthday.
The advertiser has a good products experience.
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Customer is not necessarily the same as end-user.
End users are *consumers* of a product, not providers of it. Advertisers are not at the actual receiving end of the product consumption chain, they are either entirely at the top or else somewhere in the middle. By definition, end users cannot be the advertisers, they are the people that are advertised *to*.
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Consider that Whatsapp has no information about the content of any messages sent between users, so any content within the messages that are sent cannot be harvested to generate any kind of targeted advertising, the *only* thing that they have are names and phone numbers, and who is sending messages to whom, with no basis for understanding why beyond anything that might have been communicated out of band directly to Whatsapp. So since Whatsapp has no information about its users that can be used to actually g
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Structural solution is necessary (Score:2)
The only feasible solution to combat this is distributed peer to peer implementations. Maybe good people at TOR project could take a short break from trying to save the world and build a privacy-conscious chat app for the masses?
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They have: Tox?
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There's an interesting blog post on Open Whisper that argues why federation will never work.
https://whispersystems.org/blo... [whispersystems.org]
Any who thought Facebook wouldn't do this (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Did they break a law? (Score:2)
Whatsapp privacy policy haha (Score:2)
You can't do much without that permission: impossible to start a conversation, impossible to input a name for someone that started a conversation with you, impossible to add contacts by hand in whatsapp; it have to be in the phone contact's list.
When I asked their support about this, they kindly redirected me to their FAQs, explained to me that they use phone numbers to identify
Opt out (Score:2)
https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/e... [whatsapp.com]
Mitigation and alternatives (Score:3)
If this really bothers you, Signal [whispersystems.org] is a perfectly good alternative to WhatsApp, which is completely open source and with almost identical functionality. Another surprisingly good and also open source alternative is Wire [wire.com], which doesn't rely on phone numbers, and it's completely multiplatform.
If you can't vote with your dollars, vote with your feet.
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If you thought it wasn't going to change... (Score:2)
Then you're either not very smart, or you've been paying ZERO attention for the last decade or two.
Facebook didn't buy Whatsapp because they like their logo - they bought them to monetize them somehow.
The way Facebook USUALLY monetizes things is to learn as much about you as possible, and then sell ads targeting you.
It's hardly surprising that Facebook would start to try to make use of any data that Whatsapp has. And remember that Facebook acts as though it things privacy is a thing for other people - not f