“We know that privacy is a priority for our users, and we want to be very clear: this update does not change anything about how we operate, and there is no change in how we use your data or who we share it with, including Meta.”
In September, the Irish Data Protection Commission, DPC, which is overseas chinese in australia data responsible for the entire European Union, fined WhatsApp a record €225 million , finding that the messaging service's terms of use were not clear or detailed enough. The company had until Monday, November 22, to complete and update the texts that explain to its users how their data is used.
The new text, which is significantly longer than the previous one, now details all the data collected and the conditions under which it can be transmitted. A long table lists the circumstances in which certain information can be collected, whether when sending a message or during security checks.
WhatsApp has appealed
WhatsApp has appealed the Irish regulator's decision. "We disagree with [the Irish regulator's decision] and have appealed because we believe we are already providing all the necessary information to our users ," the company announced in a statement sent to Le Monde . "No matter where you are in the world, we protect your personal messages with end-to-end encryption, which means that no one, not even WhatsApp, can read or listen to them ," it said.
Compared to many services, and in particular other social networking platforms, WhatsApp actually collects relatively little information about its users: in addition to the phone number, the list of contacts, the profile picture and an approximate geolocation, the messaging service mainly records the metadata of exchanges (their time, the numbers of the participants in a discussion), but not their content, which is encrypted by default.
This update to the terms of use comes a little less than a year after a change to the rules of use that was very poorly received by a significant portion of the application's users. A rather technical update to the rules, described in a threatening manner by early messages announcing that users who refused them would soon no longer be able to use the application, had then provoked a major protest movement and an exodus of some users to other messaging services.
