After being slapped with a massive fine for breaching data privacy rules in Europe, WhatsApp has announced that from Monday it is going to add more details to its privacy policy and will explain how exactly the global messaging service deals with users’ data.
The messaging platform’s privacy policy is going to be reorganised to include more information about the data it collects and how it is used. The updated privacy policy will also explain in greater detail how it “protects data shared across borders for its global service” along with the “legal foundations for processing the data”.
To draw attention to the new policy changes, WhatsApp is going to display a banner notification on top of the chat list for European users. Clicking on this list will take them to the new information about the changes and their data.
These policy changes for WhatsApp have come in post the massive 225 million euro fine that it was hit with in September by Ireland’s data privacy watchdog for violating European Union’s stringent data protection rules. The rules WhatsApp violated involve the transparency about sharing people’s data with other companies under Meta (Facebook). Ireland’s Data Privacy Commision is the main privacy regulator for WhatsApp in the European Union.
While WhatsApp has rolled out updates to its privacy policy, the platform said that it disagreed with the decision but has had to comply “while it appeals”. The latest update does not change how the platform handles data and WhatsApp users will not have to agree to or accept anything new.
This is in stark contrast to the policy changes that WhatsApp wanted to roll out in India regarding the data from business accounts to be shared with Facebook’s other companies. Besides the obvious privacy issue, one other aspect that caused trouble for WhatsApp in India was the fact that WhatsApp was adhering to EU’s data protection rules but wasn’t doing the same here.
WhatsApp plans to update its privacy policy in India was followed by a massive backlash in the country and saw many users migrating to alternate chat services like Telegram and Signal for better privacy. WhatsApp has since pushed back its plans to roll out the update in India.
WhatsApp’s lates privacy updates are just for European users and does not affect users in other countries.
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