Short version: your personal conversations remain personal and encrypted. WhatsApp’s data sharing hasn’t really changed, its security hasn’t changed, it remains the largest end-to-end encrypted platform available.
Long version: Keeping aside any jokes on what valuable or secret data you are really trying to protect.
1. WhatsApp is still end to end encrypted, which means that ALL your chat threads (group or 1:1) as well as your voice/video calls are entirely secure and only available to you and the people you are talking to. Yes, that includes all your naughty content too.
2. Your contact list on the phone that you use for looking up contacts and sending messages to/calling people, is not shared with anyone, including Facebook.
3. The only time you have to worry about your data “leaking” is when you backup your WhatsApp messages to iCloud (if you are on iPhone) or equivalent Android backup service. To be able to restore that data on a new device, the backup file is not encrypted. So please protect your iCloud backups well.
4. So what are the real changes? In future IF and WHEN you start using WhatsApp to send messages to businesses or do payment transactions, the shopping data can be shared with merchants and Facebook to improve their services (example making your Ads more personalized for you). When in future will this happen? Your guess is as good as mine.
5. If nothing really has changed, why all this noise? Or a more candid version of this – why can’t WhatsApp explain this in simple language? WhatsApp over-communicates and proactively shares even the slightest change that might impact its extremely high standards on privacy to run an end to end encrypted private messaging service for 2 Billion people. Good learning for us that technically nuanced and accurate messaging doesn’t work at 2B people scale.
6. Can you give feedback to the WhatsApp team about this? Absolutely. See a more detailed response from the head of WhatsApp: https://twitter.com/wcathcart/status/1347660768225841152?s=21
7. Do I need to pay for a private/secure version of WhatsApp? Heck no. Please don’t fall for any such scams. There is only one secure, private version of WhatsApp and that is FREE for all the 2 billion people who use it. If you still feel like spending money, I’ll send you my Venmo account to transfer money to.
8. Can I stop freaking out now? Yes please and I’d like to go back and sleep as well.
And yes, feel free to forward this to your friends and family. I won’t charge any fees nor send your data to Facebook
