WhatsUp with WhatsApp
You might have seen the recent popup showing up on your WhatsApp(WA) app asking you to accept their new privacy policy. The way the changes was summarrized is not clear to you as a user of WhatsApp what its intentions are. I thought of dumbing the legal tech documents to help you understand it a bit more clearly and why Facebook(FB) wants to do so!
Well if you don’t already know. WhatsApp(WA) is part of Facebook(FB). You know the blue blue facebook, the cambridge analytica facebook, the zuck book. Yep
WhatsApp has been a free service from the start apart from the initial paid app for apple users. The WhatsApp company has never asked us a penny for such a great app that has connected us with so many people, friends and more. Obviously it wasn’t a sustainable model for the long term, WhatsApp wanted to be free as it grew to scale and then would think of charging users.
But that business model was way different when FB bought WA for $21.8 billion. Which was $55 per user at the time of acquisition. So it was not a cheap deal for FB at that time and somehow they want to make profits here largely because of the HUGE user base.
Right now WA already uses FB infrastructure to run all of its operations. So if FB’s image service is down, most likely it could also affect your WA image downloads as well. WhatsApp for Business is one endeavor where FB has made money from other businesses.
What they haven’t done yet is serve you ads where all the money lies. FB has mastered the art of AD based revenue streams. It’s almost everywhere inside Facebook and Instagram. The best and the most easy way FB can integrate ads into WA without much public outcry is status feature. One because you are already familiar with it in majority of the apps, two because it does not sneak into your chats. WA does not have much information at hand right now compared to big daddy FB. Just considering WA data is not enough to provide relevant ads to you. Since FB already has a lot of data about everyone, it will use it to show you ads on WA.
This simply means that your privacy was, is and will be at stake. You have the option to accept and continue using the app as you might be already comfortable with it and that’s normal behavior. What you could do is slowly explore different options of communicating with other people. Telegram and Signal are right now the best options to try out and get familiar with.
Hope that this post was helpful in explaining the master plan of FB. Be Aware!
