WhatsApp drives a Update of the privacy policy That sparked a backlash last month – but it promised to give people enough time to review the changes.
The messaging service has tried again to reassure users that the update prevents Facebook, its parent company, from reading their private chats. These concerns led WhatsApp to postpone the rollout of the update from February to May.
On a Thursday blog entryWhatsApp said it would put a banner on the app “that provides more information for people to read at their own pace”. The platform stated that it also uses the Status feature to share updates with users.
“We will do a lot more to make our voice clear in the future,” said Thursday’s blog post. “At some point, we’ll remind people to review and accept these updates in order to keep using WhatsApp.”
The policy is changing as WhatsApp adds a feature that allows users to send messages to businesses right on their platform. Under the new policy, users must agree to have these conversations stored on Facebook servers, leading many users to believe that Facebook, which bought WhatsApp for $ 19 billion in 2014, has access to their private chats.
The concerns caused millions of people to get started Use other encrypted messaging apps like Telegram and Signal, which added new users after WhatsApp announced the changes on January 6th.
WhatsApp struggled against its competitors on Thursday, stressing that messages between individual users are always end-to-end encrypted, which means that they cannot be read by anyone outside of the conversation.
“We saw some of our competitors trying to pretend that they couldn’t see people’s messages. If an app doesn’t offer end-to-end encryption by default, it means they can read your messages,” WhatsApp said on his blog. “Other apps say they are better because they know even less information than WhatsApp. We believe people are looking for apps that are both reliable and secure, even when WhatsApp has limited data.”
