WhatsApp transmits user data to Facebook
The statistics speak for themselves! Italians love i social network! Favorite social is Facebook, used by 56.2% of the national population. In the second position there is Whatsapp, the instant messaging service purchased by Marc Zuckerberg's company, used by six Italians out of 10. Today, however, these social networks are the protagonists of a debate which concerns access to user data. Let's try to understand what is happening.
When in 2014 Facebook bought Whatsapp for the modest sum of $ 19 billion, Jan Koum, the founder of the world's most populous messaging service, swore and perjured that he would protect user data, saying the sale to the company of Marc Zuckerberg would not have entailed the modification of company policies on the subject of right to privacy. Instead, as many had predicted, the privacy rules, today, they are changing and how. Whatsapp has announced that it will share some data with Facebook, including the telephone numbers of the users, to allow a Zuckerberg to send friends' best suggestions and send users more relevant ads.
Data sharing between Whatsapp and Facebook, could cause legal problems in different parts of Europe and, for this reason, the privacy regulators want more clarification on the sharing of sensitive data.
The focus of the matter is that Facebook should have asked, in advance, users whether or not they want to connect their account with Facebook and this did not happen.
For this reason the German privacy protection agency, based in Hamburg, the hub city of the German activities of Facebook, has decided to say no to data sharing, ordering the Californian company to delete the data transmitted to date.
Johannes Caspar, the Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Hamburg said that what is happening is not only deceptive to users and the public, but also constitutes a violation of national data protection legislation. data.
Also in Italy Whatsapp is Facebook they will have to answer to the Privacy Guarantor. The President of the Italian Authority, Antonello Soro, defined the alarming situation, since it is not only the sensitive data of Facebook and Whatsapp users, but also those of users not subscribed to either of the two services, whose data are transmitted for the sole fact of being in the address book of a user of Whatsapp.
In short, the regulatory bodies want more clarification on how Facebook intends to collect and manage i sensitive data of over a billion whatsapp accounts, as the pop-up warning that appeared on users' screens a few weeks ago was not considered adequate.
