Online Ads and Data Privacy

Earlier this week, Meta announced that WhatsApp will start to show ads to its users. We wanted to outline why online ads and data privacy are fundamentally incompatible, but as it turns out, WhatsApp beat us to it – by exactly 13 years.

Today’s Internet is full of ads. It’s pretty much impossible to read an article, watch a video, or listen to a podcast without being bombarded with so-called “sponsored content.” This is, of course, annoying in and of itself, but what’s happening behind the scenes is way more disconcerting.

Big Tech corporations like Meta resort to sneakier methods than ever to identify users and track their every move in order to predict their interests, infer attributes like age, income, or sexual orientation, and create comprehensive user profiles along with detailed social graphs. The reason is simple: to sell ads.

The more Meta knows about its users, the better the ads can be targeted. The better the ads are targeted to the users, the higher the price advertisers are willing to pay and the greater Meta’s profit. Thanks to this logic, Meta has generated over $160 billion in ad revenue last year.

History Lesson

Many might not remember this, but there was a time when WhatsApp wasn’t free. Back in 2012, when photorealistic (or “skeuomorphic”) user interfaces where still a thing and most people didn’t own a smartphone yet, WhatsApp cost $0.99, either once (iOS) or annually after the first year (other platforms).

Exactly 13 years ago today, on June 18, 2012, WhatsApp published a blog post that’s particularly interesting in light of their recent introduction of targeted ads. In the piece entitled “Why we don't sell ads,” Jan Koum, one of the app’s co-founders, highlights why online ads and data privacy are not compatible in any way, shape, or form.

Even back then, he noted that “companies know literally everything about you, your friends, your interests, and they use it all to sell ads.” He goes on to conclude that “when advertising is involved you the user are the product.”

While WhatsApp didn’t employ end-to-end encryption in 2012 (and thus couldn’t be considered secure), the service itself was much more focused on user privacy than it is today, even though large-scale marketing campaigns are trying to convince users otherwise.

After all, the claim that “Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it,” as stated in the aforementioned blog post, is certainly not something WhatsApp can still stand behind – in fact, the exact opposite is true today.