Remember the beginning of the year, when Elon Musk called for the deletion of the WhatsApp application and half of your acquaintances switched to Telegram and the other to Signal?
All this because WhatsApp was going to change the terms of use and wanted to force its users to agree that the communication platform could share their data with its parent company – Facebook.
So the most greedy tool for collecting user data in the world. From the moment Facebook bought the social network WhatsApp for $ 19.3 billion in 2014, it was clear that the day of reckoning would come. That is, the extraction of data from WhatsApp users.
Originally, the conditions were supposed to change in February, but WhatsApp, after a wave of global resentment and a panic exodus of users, withdrew from the plan and postponed the date to May. And see you, May is in full swing and D-Day is on the calendar, specifically this Saturday, May 15th.
Millions of users have already received an in-app warning: if they do not agree to the new terms, they will lose access to their WhatsApp accounts and the messages in them. From Saturday, most of the two billion users of the application are really starting a new era, and Facebook is not backing down from its introduction this time.
The application has even issued instructions on how to delete an account if the user does not agree with the new terms. But what happens if you just don’t click on the conditions?
The account appears to be suspended in a few weeks, but users will continue to receive notifications that they have received a new message. They just won’t be able to read it and of course not even answer it. You also can’t make or make video calls from the app.
“After several weeks of limited operation, you will no longer be able to receive calls or notifications, and WhatsApp will stop notifying you of messages and phone calls,” Facebook added in a statement to change the terms.
As harsh as such an approach may sound, in reality it is still a gauntlet for Facebook. In the past, the company applied changes to the terms under the password all or nothing – if users did not click on the changes, they simply lost their features from day one. No transition period.
In response to Saturday’s upcoming ultimatum, the German regulator for Facebook supervision issued a decision prohibiting social networks from processing personal data of WhatsApp users, because it perceives the new conditions of use of the application as illegal.
According to him, they violate the principles of GDPR set by the European Union, which are to protect the citizens of member states from data mining.
Of course, Facebook does not like the ban, and the company, like a spokesman for WhatsApp, objected that it was a fundamental misunderstanding of the new conditions of use of the communication application. According to Facebook, users’ data will be safe and messages will remain private.
Nevertheless, the German authorities called on the European Data Protection Board to intervene and issue a Europe-wide regulation that would apply to all 27 member states.
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