Signal, one the most popular encrypted messaging apps saw a swell of new users signing up for the platform. After a number of sign-ups procedures, even the company has seen delays in phone number verifications of new accounts across multiple cell providers.
What is the reason behind or why so many new users interested in trying the platform? There are two culprits: Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and Signal competitor WhatsApp.
Elon Musk has now become the world’s richest person after surpassing Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in net worth. He has been active in his criticism of Facebook in the past years, who also followed up the meme with a suggestion to his 41.5 million followers: just download Signal instead of using a Facebook product. Smartly, Musk never called out Facebook or WhatsApp specifically by name through any of his posts.
It has become a controversial topic in the least time. It was not immediately clear whether Musk was even aware of the current WhatsApp privacy dustup, but it tends to be Facebook-owned messaging app to implement a new privacy policy on February 8th. It has outlined a new privacy policy that it no longer includes language indicating it will allow users to opt out of data sharing with Facebook. The new policy expressly outlines how WhatsApp shares data like phone number, address, profile name and other info with Facebook.
According to the new policy of WhatsApp “As part of the Facebook family of companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information with, this family of companies.”
A Facebook spokesperson stated that the changes are going into effect next month which are designed to address data sharing between Facebook and WhatsApp. Also, it was stated that if you live in Europe, WhatsApp never shares data with Facebook for ad-targeting purposes under any circumstances.
Since everything got messed on social media as WhatsApp users thought their data has been shared with Facebook. All of the scenarios have created a perfect stir on social media in which WhatsApp users appear to leave the platform and join Signal Messenger that is a nonprofit-run encrypted messaging app not owned by the largest social network.
After all the controversies, WhatsApp has issued a lengthy statement that totally clears that the updated privacy policy “does not change WhatsApp’s data sharing practices with Facebook.”