Saturday 28 / September / 2024
Muscat: WhatsApp users will soon have their data, such as their mobile number, shared with their parent company Facebook, the messaging service has said in a statement.
Those who do not agree to share this information with Facebook will have no choice but to delete their WhatsApp accounts, and switch to another messaging app, or stop using such services altogether.
“You must provide your mobile phone number and basic information (including a profile name of your choice) to create a WhatsApp account,” said the company. “If you don’t provide us with this information, you will not be able to create an account to use our services.”
WhatsApp says it needs this information to “operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market” its operations.
The company added that it uses this information to “operate and provide our services, including providing customer support, completing purchases or transactions, improving, fixing, and customizing our services; and connecting our services with Facebook company products that you may use.
“We also use information we have to understand how people use our services, evaluate and improve our services, research, develop, and test new services and features, and conduct troubleshooting activities,” the company went on to say. “We also use your information to respond to you when you contact us.”
Facebook owns and operates five companies, WhatsApp included. The others are the social media site, which is formally known as Facebook Technologies, Onavo, Facebook Payments, and CrowdTangle.
Despite its parent company being the victim of many data breaches in the past, which have exposed personal information such as phone numbers and email IDs of millions of account users, WhatsApp claims it puts users’ privacy at the forefront of its policy.
At the end of 2019, for example, a data breach enabled user IDs, phone numbers and names of 267 million Facebook users to be stolen. This followed another one in April 2019, where the details of more than half a billion people had been stolen by hackers.
“Safety, security and integrity are an integral part of our services,” added WhatsApp. “We use information we have to verify accounts and activity, combat harmful conduct, protect users against bad experiences and spam, and promote safety, security and integrity on and off our services, such as by investigating suspicious activity or violations of our terms and policies, and to ensure our services are being used legally."
