WhatsApp Data Privacy and its alternatives

"USE SIGNAL." - Elon Musk

The growth of the Signal App has increased surprisingly following the statements of the CEO of Tesla and the new WhatsApp Policy.  

Everyone is listening and reading the news about the change in WhatsApp Policy and most of us are also switching from WhatsApp to other apps like "Signal, Telegram, etc". For this reason, Whatsapp has extended the date of implementation of the new Privacy Policy from February 8 to May 21.

We all know about the new Privacy Policy of Whatsapp that now the data of Whatsapp will be shared with its parent company Facebook. Since Facebook was not able to protect the data for users that's the reason why users are getting afraid about the data sharing with Facebook. 

In this article, you will get to know what are the information will be shared with Facebook and what are the consequences of it and also how can we protect our data if we are using WhatsApp.

Why Data Sharing with Facebook?

Let's go back to 6 years ago when Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 Billion which means approx $55 per user. FB broke its bank to buy WhatsApp because  70% of users were active on WhatsApp every day, compared to 62% on Facebook at that time. This was facebook's biggest move to buy WhatsApp.

Now if a company is investing such a huge amount to buy another company, then there will definitely be some profit in it. Hence, Whatsapp is now saying that they are sharing some information with Facebook.

Information shared by WhatsApp

According to the new Privacy Policy, Whatsapp is sharing the following information to Facebook:

1. Device Hardware Model
2. Battery Status
3. Signal Strength
4. Time Zone
5. Your IP Address ( device's location)
6. Profile Picture
7. Status
8. Name on your WhatsApp Account
9. Contact Numbers and their DPs

Apart from this Information, now Government can also take data of users such as name, profile pic, etc from WhatsApp.

It is clearly written in the privacy policy that not only Facebook, but third-party apps linked to Facebook will also share your data.

Do your chats safe?

There is a lot of misunderstanding that now our chats are also be shared with Facebook but WhatsApp has clearly mentioned in the privacy policy that the chats are end to end encrypted and they do not store the chats in any of the databases. But the raw data of the chats can be generated and used and for the programmer raw data is important. 

In simple words, the chats are encrypted and can not be used or retained in the future.

For WhatsApp Business, the chats are not encrypted and WhatsApp also said that the chats on Business WhatsApp are not encrypted and also not end to end protected.

How to protect yourself from data sharing

There are lots of ways so that you can protect the data and sharing of data with Facebook. WhatsApp shares your location to Facebook so you can use VPN  to hide your IP Address. You can also avoid putting private photos as your status which you don't want to be shared publicly.

Future of Signal App In India

Due to the new change in WhatsApp Policy, Signal App is getting an amazing response from users around the globe. 

But the majority is still using WhatsApp and there are so and so many people who trust WhatsApp and they are the old users and they are not going to move from WhatsApp to any other app for their daily chats and attachment sharing. 

"We can't convince our parents, our relatives who are not aware of such things to move from WhatsApp to any other app." -Hitesh Choudhary (LearnCodeOnline) 

This is just a wave of signals just because of some trustworthy issues and because of a statement from a big giant CEO.

Let's see what will happen in the future and what is the future of WhatsApp and Signal.

That's a wrap on my blog. I hope you all guys are doing great.

Have a happy surf.

Feel free to drop feedback on the comment section.