They were able to do this as your phone number is your username on WhatsApp, so they purchased lists of phone numbers to target.īoth issues were ongoing through 2018, a year that was infamously terrible for Meta. As this kind of misinformation was so easy to spread, business people in Brazil set up companies that created illegal WhatsApp misinformation campaigns against candidates. In Brazil, WhatsApp was the primary source of fake news throughout the 2018 elections. In late 2020, the first stages of this were put in place when the company linked Messenger with Instagram Direct. Then, in 2019, Meta announced plans to merge its messaging platforms. ![]() In the years since, Meta has made changes to facilitate this data sharing.įollowing the 2016 announcement, you could opt out of the cross-platform data sharing on WhatsApp, although this option was quietly removed sometime later. Your WhatsApp messages could be at risk because of this.ĭespite assuring users that their data wouldn’t be publicly available on Facebook, the implication was that Meta would instead store it in Facebook’s inaccessible and hidden profile of you. Although it didn’t reveal the full extent of this data transfer, it included your phone number and your usage data, like when you last used the service. In 2016, WhatsApp updated its Privacy Policy to allow sharing of data from WhatsApp to Meta, Facebook at the time. It didn’t take long for Meta to go back on this agreement. So in 2014, when Meta decided that it wanted to add WhatsApp to the “Meta Family,” the European Union (EU) only approved the deal after Meta assured it that the two companies, and their data, would be kept separate.
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