I wonder what kind of data WhatsApp could be sharing with FB, given the fact that actual conversations are end-to-end encrypted. I imagine it could be something like 1) When do you sleep/wake-up, 2) Enumerating people in your social circle, 3) Guess what you're upto if you use the "Status" feature, and similar things. Now FB knows a LOT more than that about you. If you are an active FB user, it doesn't make sense to worry about what WhatsApp does to you.
Contacts. Now Facebook not only knows who you speak to online, but they also have access to the people and businesses you deal with in the 'real world' too.
Exactly. To use WhatsApp you have to let them copy all the contacts from the phone to their servers, and they do it all the time.
Pity that e.g. Apple doesn't implement some special configuration for the privacy conscious users, which would allow me to: "give to the app1 only contacts a, b, c" and "give to the app2 only contacts e, f, g." At the moment all the apps that I use and which insist on access to the contacts get all the contacts you ever stored on your mobile phone. The apps should also not get my notes to the contacts, the birthdays of the contacts etc. Ideally Whatsapp should get only phone numbers, and only these that I want to give.
In Android, Google should (it it hasn't) also implement this as a security feature, the benefit for them is: limit the access of the user's contacts to their competitors, by those users who'd use the feature (I don't use Android, is there something like that?).
Anyway, by using WhatsApp, since lats year you give Facebook all the phone contacts which they will store and match even if you didn't want to give these to Facebook for Facebook.com or whatever.
"“Privacy is incredibly important to WhatsApp. It’s why we collect very little data, and encrypt every message,” a spokeswoman for WhatsApp said."
When "a little" is all your contacts in the phone, it's more than a little for Facebook.
It’s far worse than that. If you and any two people in your list have done the same, then the app has just been given permission to a whole graph, and on and on. Connections are easy to link up. After awhile, it almost doesn’t matter if you give permission as long as they can infer a long list of possible connections based on everything else they know.
I guess it's mainly aimed at those who are not on facebook but use whatsapp. Or even those who don't use whatsapp or facebook but are in an address book of someone who uses whatsapp...so everyone.
