WhatsApp is becoming more like parent company Facebook, both in terms of privacy and enabling communications between business and users.
The messaging application announced in a blog post that its terms of service and privacy policy have been updated for the first time in four years in order to reflect its acquisition by Facebook in October 2014, as well as recent updates including end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp Calling and its tools for the web and desktop. More details follow:
We’re also updating these documents to make clear that we’ve rolled out end-to-end encryption. When you and the people you message are using the latest version of WhatsApp, your messages are encrypted by default, which means you’re the only people who can read them. Even as we coordinate more with Facebook in the months ahead, your encrypted messages stay private and no one else can read them–not WhatsApp, not Facebook, nor anyone else. We won?t post or share your WhatsApp number with others, including on Facebook, and we still won’t sell, share or give your phone number to advertisers. But by coordinating more with Facebook, we’ll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp. And by connecting your phone number with Facebook’s systems, Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them. For example, you might see an ad f...