WhatsApp is the world's most popular messaging app. This application, which joined Facebook in 2014, has recently been on the agenda with its new privacy policy.

Announced in early 2020, the new policy removes users' choice not to share their data with other Facebook-owned and third-party apps until now. While this situation is met with concern by users, many questions come to mind. Is WhatsApp giving up on data privacy ?

The main problem here is that many countries have legal loopholes against the privacy policies of this and similar applications.

WhatsApp's updated privacy policy will no longer be valid, thanks to the data protection law (GDPR - General Data Protection Regulation) in force in European Union countries.

Since the European Union countries make legal arrangements regarding such situations, Whatsapp is legally bound not to share data with Facebook, even under the same company.

Long story short, this situation is considered illegal in European Union countries, while it is not considered illegal in other countries because there is no law regarding it. Therefore, many countries have become aware of the danger and have started to take steps to enact laws about it.

Facebook states that WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption will remain unchanged, but this ensures that the company simply cannot see or share your personal messages with anyone.

With the updated privacy policy, WhatsApp will now be able to share the person's meta data (we can say online activity data) with Facebook and other applications (Instagram).

In this case, it will mean that your data is under surveillance by a data sharing network where all Facebook applications are integrated with each other.

In fact, WhatsApp made commitments in 2009 that it would not sell user data to any third party. That changed after Facebook bought the app in 2014. and by 2017 it started sharing data with Facebook, but users were also given the option to opt out. Now, this has morphed into a "take it or leave it" policy.

Therefore, since the updated privacy policy also eliminates the choice of whether to share personal data with Facebook and other applications, the user is left with initially, it creates a situation contrary to expectations when signing up for WhatsApp.

As a result, will Whatsapp's new privacy policy mean that users will now start switching to alternative messaging platforms ?

We will see this together in the future...