Privacy Advocacy Groups Seek Block Of Facebook/WhatsApp Acquisition
Privacy advocacy groups are demanding the U.S. Federal Trade Commission block the $19 billion acquisition Facebook made for the messaging service WhatsApp – at least until the popular social media network tells how it’ll use the 450 million users’ personal data.
Non-profit groups like Centre for Digital Democracy and Electronic Privacy Information Centre are disputing the acquisition because of the commitment WhatsApp has about not collecting user information for the purposes of advertisements.
According to the groups, Facebook often uses the information of their users for advertising reasons, and has stipulated it was use the information of the WhatsApp users in their profiling business model. They said the acquisition by Facebook of WhatsApp violates users and is an unfair, deceptive trade practice. The acquisition should be carefully reviewed by the FTC.
The groups said many WhatsApp users are concerned with how the information would be used under the management of the popular social media website. A Facebook Page was created dubbed “Please Don’t Ruin WhatsApp” with people – including journalists – expressing their worries about the issue.
In the filing, it was stipulated that several European data protection authorities are investigating the deal, which include both German state of Schleswig-Holstein Data Protection Commissioner Thilo Weichert and Dutch commissioner Jacob Kohnstamm.
WhatsApp keeps the cell phone numbers of its users, but does not keep any additional contact information like email addresses. WhatsApp and Facebook have both said the firms would run separately even after the acquisition. Plus, the companies said the privacy policies would stay the same. However, the filing notes that Facebook has, after mergers, changed its privacy policies – most recently the Instagram acquisition that took place in 2012.
Should the deal go through, advocacy groups seek the FTC to demand Facebook stipulate what it’ll do with the information its gets about the WhatsApp users and protect it from being used in the social media’s information collection practices.
According to the complaints, users with WhatsApp could not have expected that using the pro-privacy messaging system would lead to a takeover by Facebook and its data collection practices.
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