Thursday, August 25, 2016

Telecommunications – WhatsApp shared phone numbers of users with Facebook – Süddeutsche.de

Direct from the dpa news channel

Mountain View (dpa) – Nearly two years after the 20 billion dollar acquisition of WhatsApp wants Facebook interlink the two services more closely together. ” / p>

in the future, the telephone number of WhatsApp-user as well as information about how often the short message service is used, be passed on to Facebook.

at the same time stressed WhatsApp that Facebook in no case access to the contents of Text messages will get. With the introduction of end-to-end encryption in the spring they were anyway only available for the users involved and not even for WhatsApp itself, it said.

With the balance of the phone number should inter alia more relevant advertising at display Facebook, the company said on Thursday. The buddy search should be improved. From the Hamburg data protection officer Johannes Caspar came sharp criticism of the changes.

Existing WhatsApp members may object to at least the data used for the personalization of Facebook advertising and Friends suggestions on how the service made clear. will be passed on Facebook the phone number anyway. The information could then be used by Facebook, for example, to improve the operation of the infrastructure and safety, it said.

For example, when a WhatsApp users have shared his cell phone number with dealers ads on Facebook and turn this highly loaded their databases, it could be shown by comparing rates of Business. In the new conditions of use it is also about the plans to use WhatsApp for communication between users and businesses. The announced earlier this year co-founder Jan Koum. The second large short message service of the online network – the Facebook Messenger – will play a major role in contacts between companies and their customers

privacy advocates Caspar announced an audit of plans to “Beyond the little clear and in. be untransparent privacy policy will be to examine the way in which takes place the exchange of data and whether there is a legal basis for this. ” The sharing of information from user accounts between Facebook and WhatsApp without user consent is to provide massively by European and national data protection standards in question. “Just knowing about the stored phone numbers of users opens up prospects, would be grateful for any intelligence service.” The move marks the entry of WhatsApp in the capitalization of data and will cause “that Facebook even more about its users know as before,” warned Caspar.

Facebook had WhatsApp in autumn 2014 for around 22 billion dollar taken. The short message service now has over one billion users. The original plan of Koum was to operate WhatsApp with an annual fee of around one dollar and euro per user as an independent company. The acquisition by Facebook brought the service access to the gigantic computing infrastructure of the online network. At the same time WhatsApp again became a free application. Clear was that at some point a way needs to be found, such as Facebook can benefit from the billion deal financially.

At the same time the Ukrainians Koum had always stressed that he by his childhood years in the communist Soviet Union large value put on the protection of privacy. In Brazil WhatsApp had been repeatedly blocked in recent months on a court order, because the service out moved any encrypted messages. “Our faith in private communication can not be shaken,” it said in the blog post on Thursday.

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