Don’t be like my best friend; privacy settings matter!
My best friend and I disagree a lot; about politics, mostly. Our latest spat was about WhatsApp’s changes to their terms and privacy policy.
WhatsApp is awesome, or at least it used to be. Changes rolled out yesterday gives WhatsApp the ability to share users’ phone numbers with Facebook, which bought the company back in 2014. In a blogpost, WhatsApp said, “by connecting your phone number with Facebook’s systems, Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them.” The move could also see advertising messages sent direct to user’s phones, and some predict that it signals a merging of Messenger and WhatsApp in the near future.
I don’t want my former boss popping up as a suggested friend on Facebook, nor the random bike shop guy that I gave my number to the other day. Yet convincing all of my friends to move to a new messaging service would take time, and really, can a service rival WhatsApp? I am not personally a fan of Viber, Telegram doesn’t have an integrated call option, and going back to SMS is not an option unless I want to re-mortgage my parent’s house to pay for the bill…
So I unticked the ‘share my account info’ box and accepted the terms.
And I encouraged my friends to do the same. I am happy to say most of them responded to my PSA blast with messages like, “thanks for letting me know!”
But when I went to warn my best friend, our conversation went like this:
Me: You got the WhatsApp change of T&C yet?
Him: Yup, why do you ask?
Me: Did you read or just accept?
Him: Accept, I was mid conversation when it came up. Any major changes?
Me: Yep. Sharing your info with FB. [Image of instructions to change app permissions.] Do that. And read next time.
Him: So? WhatsApp has no info on me, Facebook is the one that already knows everything.
Me: Have you got your phone number listed on FB already? Have you got contacts that you have on WhatsApp but not on FB? And I thought you said you hated advertising…? Just do it.
Him: Also it’s for targeted ads, Facebook is going to give me ads any ways, might as well make the ads decent. No, I’ll just leave it.
Me: Fine. Just seems funny that you wouldn’t change it; you seem so blasé about your privacy.
Him: I’m not, I have to have my privacy settings locked down. […] However, mass analysed metadata and profiling for advertising isn’t a breach of my privacy, it’s not a big deal at all.
Are you paying attention?? So, as long as it is convenient, will you abandon any notion of privacy?
Are we sleepwalking into time of no privacy, or are we already there? Looking at the wider scope of things, I think that we are — and that should worry us all.
With Internet of Things (IoT)/smart cities roll out, those are the choices we are soon set to make: privacy or living in the new world. This Cisco infographic from 2011 shows the amazing convenience of living in an IoT enabled world.
This reality won’t need all your information and data to exist, but your alarm will need to know when your meeting is so you can be woken up early if the traffic report it is connected to knows of a massive pile up on the motorway (which obviously would never happen as we will all be driven around in hyper intelligent driverless cars).
So maybe my friend is right; let’s just give up any hope of maintaining our privacy now and lean in.
