The announcement made by WhatsApp last month about changes in its privacy policy sent shockwaves across India. The young community management industry in India has relied heavily on WhatsApp groups to grow. On a daily basis, many hobby, professional, family and networking communities in India thrive on WhatsApp. The fear that data privacy of the community members may be breached led to wide repercussions and users started leaving WhatsApp. Signal app reached a sort of virality – even WhatsApp had to issue a clarification & put its policy changes on hold.
Frankly, not much has changed than how it was earlier, except that Facebook is working towards its goal of unifying Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp for building a seamless platform for businesses and transactions.
In recent years, as Zuckerberg's influence grows, Facebook has been accused of tampering with the basic DNA of WhatsApp. Even the original founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton fell out and left WhatsApp in 2018. In 2016, end-to-end encryption was introduced for all communications on WhatsApp. Later that year, WhatsApp shared that it would share the phone numbers and user analytics data with Facebook for operations improvement. Therefore, we have been knowingly or unknowingly sharing a lot of information with Facebook since 2016.
Facebook is notorious for its alleged fiddling with user data. But in this case, most of it is data that is widely available on your social media accounts or within the various job-applications or forms you fill up on the internet each day. You may also be sharing such data knowingly or unknowingly with various other apps.
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According to the Tendulkar commission’s assessment, poverty in India is gauged at under Rs 30/day. It essentially gives you a rough idea about the quality of human lives in one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. A developmental question that baffles many is that if the value of human life appears to be held at such low pedestals, how can data related to those lives be valued higher? And let us be very clear here – we are not talking about private or sensitive communications/texts/calls/or videos. For a country that hitherto was the largest contributor to the revenues of an unsecured app like TikTok and even for that matter PUBG, how did WhatsApp data privacy suddenly become a big issue – especially the business ended data? Most of us use Google Search, Chrome, YouTube & Gmail on a daily basis, employing digital home assistants like Alexa to simplify our lives. Ever paid a thought about the kind of information getting collected there? We simply can’t, unless a sense of data protection paranoia sinks in. If you’ve watched The Social Dilemma or Snowden, you may already be aware of the dangers in store. It’s true that companies are after your data and tracking your browsing habits. In fact, many people have started selling digital identities for money. But data privacy laws also become a clog in the bottle-neck for digital growth.
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The announcement made by WhatsApp last month about changes in its privacy policy sent shockwaves across India. The young community management industry in India has relied heavily on WhatsApp groups to grow. On a daily basis, many hobby, professional, family and networking communities in India thrive on WhatsApp. The fear that data privacy of the community members may be breached led to wide repercussions and users started leaving WhatsApp. Signal app reached a sort of virality – even WhatsApp had to issue a clarification & put its policy changes on hold.
Frankly, not much has changed than how it was earlier, except that Facebook is working towards its goal of unifying Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp for building a seamless platform for businesses and transactions.
In recent years, as Zuckerberg's influence grows, Facebook has been accused of tampering with the basic DNA of WhatsApp. Even the original founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton fell out and left WhatsApp in 2018. In 2016, end-to-end encryption was introduced for all communications on WhatsApp. Later that year, WhatsApp shared that it would share the phone numbers and user analytics data with Facebook for operations improvement. Therefore, we have been knowingly or unknowingly sharing a lot of information with Facebook since 2016.
Facebook is notorious for its alleged fiddling with user data. But in this case, most of it is data that is widely available on your social media accounts or within the various job-applications or forms you fill up on the internet each day. You may also be sharing such data knowingly or unknowingly with various other apps.
Also Check Out:
According to the Tendulkar commission’s assessment, poverty in India is gauged at under Rs 30/day. It essentially gives you a rough idea about the quality of human lives in one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. A developmental question that baffles many is that if the value of human life appears to be held at such low pedestals, how can data related to those lives be valued higher? And let us be very clear here – we are not talking about private or sensitive communications/texts/calls/or videos. For a country that hitherto was the largest contributor to the revenues of an unsecured app like TikTok and even for that matter PUBG, how did WhatsApp data privacy suddenly become a big issue – especially the business ended data? Most of us use Google Search, Chrome, YouTube & Gmail on a daily basis, employing digital home assistants like Alexa to simplify our lives. Ever paid a thought about the kind of information getting collected there? We simply can’t, unless a sense of data protection paranoia sinks in. If you’ve watched The Social Dilemma or Snowden, you may already be aware of the dangers in store. It’s true that companies are after your data and tracking your browsing habits. In fact, many people have started selling digital identities for money. But data privacy laws also become a clog in the bottle-neck for digital growth.
If you’re in search of a platform for building your online community, then checkout LikeMinds.
Deploy customised features on top of chat and feed in 15 minutes using LikeMinds SDK.
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