Citing Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp German data protection regulator on Thursday has urged WhatsApp users to switch to a more safe and secure messaging service immediately.
The social networking giant on Wednesday announced it is all set to acquire WhatsApp for a whopping $19 billion deal which includes US$12 billion in shares, $4 billion in cash as well as $3 billion in stock options.
Thilo Weichert, data protection commissioner for the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, is of the opinion that the deal between the two would lead to serious data protection issues as Whatsapp’s users’ personal data will likely be merged with Facebook data.
Communication metadata and content of both the services when merged can be used for profiling and can be commercially exploited for advertising purposes, Weichert said.
A Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment anything on Weichert’s concerns. WhatsApp also assured in a blog post on Wednesday that nothing will change for the users.
In its privacy policy the company has already stated that it will not sell or share user’s personal information such as their mobile phone numbers with other third-party companies for any kind of commercial or marketing use without user’s consent.
However, the company may share that information with third party service providers “to the extent that it is reasonably necessary to perform, improve or maintain the WhatsApp Service.”
Weichert also highlighted the fact that both companies are U.S. based, where the data protection laws are less strict as compared to Europe.
Weichert claims that WhatsApp is an insecure way of communicating and has had very serious security and privacy issues, so he strongly recommended Germans to start using other German or Europe-based services that are more transparent about their security and are subject to an effective data protection regime.
[Source: TechWorld]
