American privacy units Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy have filed an ‘unfair and deceptive practices’ complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. They accuse Facebook of violating the consent. It also reports that WhatsApp’s more stringent privacy policy conflicts with Facebook’s more open one.
The authority duo is asking the FTC to “halt Facebook’s proposed acquisition of WhatsApp” until the concerns listed in the complaint are “adequately” taken care and meet the policy measures. The main concern is that the acquisition will give Facebook to give access to all of the mobile phone numbers WhatsApp has updated.
The Center for Digital Democracy said in a statement on its website that “The millions of WhatsApp users who signed up for the service were promised — repeatedly as you will read in the complaint — that the company didn’t want to gather and commericialize their data.”
“They posed as the ‘unFacebook,’ deriding the commercial surveillance apparatus that lies at the core of contemporary online practices. Yet at the same time they made their public privacy promises, they were being wooed by Mark Zuckerberg to join The Circle — oops, I mean Facebook. Despite Facebook’s denial that WhatsApp and its digital gold mine of mobile numbers, address books, and access to selling all kinds of financial services in real-time won’t become part of its Big Data-driven advertising machine, one only has to look at what happened with Instagram (let alone the track record of the industry).”
The FTC has not updated anything yet regarding their investigation on this acquisition.
Recent
Tags
Popular
