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WhatsApp Will Be Sharing Some Of Your Information To Facebook

Whatsapp update will share your number with Facebook, concern over privacy rises.
Whatsapp
Dado Ruvic / Reuters
Whatsapp

WhatsApp won a lot of applause when it decided to make its services fully encrypted. But today WhatsApp made an announcement which might irk a lot of users. From now on if you use WhatsApp, your number will be shared to Facebook.

Today's blog post by WhatsApp highlights a number of changes. The biggest of them all is to share some of the data with Facebook so it can give you better friend suggestions.

"We plan to share some information with Facebook and the Facebook family of companies that will allow us to coordinate more, such as to fight spam and abuse, and improve experiences across our services and those of Facebook and the Facebook family. For example, once you have accepted our updated Terms and Privacy Policy, we will share some of your account information with Facebook and the Facebook family of companies, like the phone number you verified when you registered with WhatsApp, as well as the last time you used our service," the post said

Apart from this, it has revealed that it plans to bring on ads to the platform. WhatsApp says that you won't see the banner ads ever on the platform but you might get messages from the companies you already know.

In future, you might be getting messages for flight information, order confirmation, item delivery and more. This makes users' life hell as she already receives notification from the app, an SMS, a confirmation email and what not. Getting another message on another platform is no something really any user wants at this moment of time.

WhatsApp might be thinking about making a platform such as WeChat. Or even replace SMS. A great thought, but how do you ask companies just to send you WhatsApp messages and not SMS.

The company which boosted its work on privacy is letting go of some walls it had made. While getting acquired by Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and Jan Koum both had stated that the services would run separately.

WhatsApp Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Jan Koum
Albert Gea / Reuters
WhatsApp Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Jan Koum

"Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA, and we built WhatsApp around the goal of knowing as little about you as possible: You don't have to give us your name and we don't ask for your email address. We don't know your birthday. We don't know your home address. We don't know where you work. We don't know your likes, what you search for on the internet or collect your GPS location. None of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp, and we really have no plans to change that," WhatsApp co-founder Koum had said.

On the positive side, the company says that it will still support end-to-end encryption and neither Facebook or WhatsApp will be able to read your messages. Also, WhatsApp is providing a 30 day window for the existing user to opt out from sharing the information to Facebook.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.