The new terms would allow users of WhatsApp Business to use the updated functions in the EU and the UK, a company's spokesperson told news agency AFP. The terms include facilitating e-commerce through WhatsApp, as Facebook tries to monetize the messaging service. After that, the protracted, conscious uncoupling will really be over.The messaging service WhatsApp on Thursday announced to its almost two million users its updated terms, which would allow the app to share further users' data with its parent company Facebook. Holdouts who steadfastly refuse to accept the new policy in the weeks to come will have 120 days after their accounts becomes inactive to reconsider. 'This is why simple, easy-to-read policies go a long way, as do updates that include a summary of the major changes.'įor WhatsApp, that bill from its 2016 privacy policy changes came due this year. “If you don’t give users a good, clear notice when you make a change, people freak out whenever it’s eventually communicated properly,” she says.

Merrill points out though, that WhatsApp is in this situation in the first place because users clearly didn't understand the privacy policy changes the company made back in 2016. 'WhatsApp is being relied on more than ever right now and we want to keep it that way,” the spokesperson told WIRED. From WhatsApp's perspective, the slow burn gives users more chances to accept and keep using the app rather than being shut out and defecting to competitors for good. “In a way this is more friendly,” Merrill says.

But other companies go even further, she says, locking users out altogether until they accept a new policy. The gradual removal of features is unusual, says Whitney Merrill, a privacy and data protection lawyer and former Federal Trade Commission attorney. The other option would be to sever those connections with Facebook, but after years of sharing certain account data, both organizations likely consider rolling back the 2016 change as either inconceivable or intolerable. “When your users have made it clear that they would rather not accept a new policy, and your response is to very gradually push them out of an airlock, it doesn't prove that they're happy about it just because they eventually accept,' says Johns Hopkins University cryptographer Matthew Green. There's still the matter, though, of the lengths WhatsApp has had to go to to carry off this routine policy update. But the company has since opted to let the wheels very gradually come off the car over several weeks before the app careens into a ditch and stops working altogether. WhatsApp originally indicated in February that anyone who declined the updates would immediately lose functionality. Eventually you won't be able to click away at all, and the app's functionality will start to degrade. Over time, though, the pop-ups will appear more frequently. If you'd rather not agree, you'll at first be able to hit a back arrow in the upper left corner of the overlay. If you tap it, WhatsApp will continue to share certain account data of yours with Facebook. If you haven't accepted the new policy by now, you'll start to see more pop-ups in WhatsApp outlining the changes with a big green Accept button at the bottom. If you don't? WhatsApp will become unusable.īut not all at once. Rather than change the policy that sparked the controversy, WhatsApp instead moved the deadline for users to accept it from the original date of February 8 to Saturday. The changes sparked a major backlash, though, because they inadvertently highlighted WhatsApp's years-old policy of sharing certain user data, like phone numbers, with parent company Facebook. At the beginning of the year, WhatsApp took the seemingly mundane step of updating its terms of use and privacy policy, mostly focused on the app's business offerings.

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