Earlier this year, WhatsApp suffered a controversy over a new update to its terms of service. The latter notably highlighted the sharing of personal data with Facebook. The private messaging app was then fined 225 million euros last September by the Irish Commission. This decision follows the lack of information shared with users regarding the collection of personal data and its sharing with Facebook. Now, WhatsApp has just corrected the situation by offering a beautiful explanatory section revealing how the data collected is collected and used.
Here is the personal data collected by WhatsApp
Through a new post, WhatsApp came to explain in detail how and what data was collected through an update to its Privacy Policy for people residing in the European Region. The private messaging service first points out that “this update does not change the way we do business, including the way we handle, use or share your data, including with our parent company, Meta.”
In detail, WhatsApp reveals taking advantage of all of your data that is not encrypted, that is, everything that does not concern the messages you send or the calls you make. We can think of your profile picture, the About section, or the name of the discussion groups. This does not stop there, however, since WhatsApp also comes with technical metadata such as the hours of connections, the version of the application, the OS used, the people with whom you are chatting as well as the frequency of messages. exchanged with your contacts …
It can easily be deduced from this that WhatsApp can build a detailed profile of its user’s thanks to its information, however, we do not know what it can use it for. The service explains in particular officially that this data is used to measure the performance of the application or to ensure its proper functioning. What is not new is that the application cannot use its information for advertising purposes. This could only be done after consultation with the Irish Data Protection Commission.
By updating its conditions of use in Europe, WhatsApp comes, all the same, to contest in the pages of Le Monde the fine it received by declaring: “We disagree with [the decision of the Irish regulator] and we have appealed because we believe that we are already providing all the necessary information to our users ”.
