Facebook’s WhatsApp acquisition may have had a negative impact on the latter at least in Germany as within 24 hours of the acquisition announcement, Threema – a Swiss instant messaging app and a strong WhatsApp competitor – has managed to garner over 200,000 users.
Threema, which claims to have over 400,000 users as of this writing, is currently placed at the top spot on German App Store charts in the paid section.
One of the unique selling points of Threema is its end-to-end encryption feature and “Unlike other popular messaging apps (including those claiming to use encryption), even we as the server operator have absolutely no way to read your messages,” the website claims.
Facebook did reveal that nothing is going to change after the acquisition is complete and WhatsApp will continue to function as an independent service; however, for the privacy-oriented Germans this assurance is seemingly not enough.
Thilo Weichert, data protection commissioner for the German Land of Schleswig-Holstein, has already sounded alarm bells opining that 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.
The data protection commissioner recommended that users quickly abandon WhatsApp and instead opt for more secure and privacy guaranteeing German or European alternatives which are much more transparent and subject to data protection regimes.
Threema isn’t a huge company and with only three employees, it is already facing issues handling support requests from the new members.
[Source: Süddeutsche]
