#DeleteWhatsAppDay: More Relevant Than Ever
Five years ago today, on May 15, 2021, WhatsApp’s controversial new privacy policy came into effect. The update sparked global criticism and raised public awareness of the economic incentives behind data-driven online platforms. With users spending more time online, ever-growing volumes of data, and powerful new AI systems, the concerns raised back then are now even more justified than in 2021.
Mark Zuckerberg once claimed that despite the acquisition by Facebook (now Meta), “WhatsApp will continue to operate independently.” However, the messaging service has been sharing user data with its parent company for years now, and according to the current privacy policy, Meta may use this user data for marketing purposes:
WhatsApp […] shares information […] with the other Meta Companies. We may use the information […] to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services and their offerings, including the Meta Company Products. This includes: […] showing relevant offers and ads across the Meta Company Products […].
– Section “How We Work With Other Meta Companies”
This year, Meta is expected to surpass even Google in ad revenue, thereby becoming the largest digital advertising company in the world. In light of this, it’s easy to see why the US corporation has such a strong interest in user data and why WhatsApp was acquired in 2014 for 19 billion US dollars.
The more Meta knows about its users, the more precisely its ads can be targeted. And the more precisely ads are targeted, the more advertisers are willing to pay for ad placements. Thus, Meta’s profitability directly depends on how much the company knows about its users.
In order to paint as detailed a picture as possible of an individual user, data from different sources is collected, correlated, and merged into one comprehensive profile. If users have to provide a phone number to register for a service such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, establishing their identity across platforms and correlating their data is particularly easy.
Message Content vs. Metadata
Even though WhatsApp employs end-to-end encryption, detailed user profiles can still be created by systematically collecting metadata. No access to message content is required.
The metadata (i.e., information about who’s communicating with whom, when, where, etc.) that accumulates when using WhatsApp forms a comprehensive and highly revealing “social graph.” In addition, “Likes” on Facebook and Instagram not only reflect users’ interests and preferences, but further information (e.g., age group and income bracket, marital status, or sexual orientation) may also be inferred from collections of such data points.
By combining the obtained information, matching it against the social graph, and supplementing it with attributes of close contacts, the resulting data set becomes much more than the sum of its parts and speaks volumes about the user it’s associated with.
From a privacy perspective, this kind of user profiling is already concerning in and of itself. Compounding the issue, users are spending ever longer periods online and the volume of analyzable data is continuously growing. At the same time, advancements in the field of AI are progressing so rapidly that it’s not possible to predict what kinds of inferences about users can be drawn from the growing data pool in the future.
Even five years after the #DeleteWhatsAppDay was launched in response to WhatsApp’s privacy policy change, the initiative has lost none of its relevance. On the contrary: in light of social and technological developments, the question of which business model an online service is based on is more relevant today than ever before.
