From May 15, Whatsapp began to pull us from the jacket to make us accept the privacy news already finished in January in a flurry of controversy that also involved various privacy guarantors, including ours. A few days ago he made it clear that it will happen to those who reject the changes.
At the same time, however, the controversy has also rekindled, with the German Privacy Guarantor at the forefront of opposition to Facebook, the company that controls Whatsapp. Self-defense actions by users are also multiplying, however: given that in the end those who reject the news will, in the long run, be expelled from Whatsapp, there are those who are hurrying to use chat export tools (text and multimedia). The risk is of a further leak on other chats, such as Telegram and Signal, which have already had a boom in users this year due to the controversy.
This tension, on the part of the guarantors and of a competitive nature, can explain good news: Whatsapp has said that it will not immediately delete the accounts of those who reject the news.
Here is what will happen.
For “a few weeks”, nothing. Only, the reminder to accept the news will reappear. Then, “after a period of a few weeks, the reminder will become persistent. At that point – not simultaneously for all users – a limitation of functions will occur. “You will not be able to access the chat list, however you will be able to answer incoming calls and video calls. If you have notifications enabled, you can touch them to read or reply to messages, or call back in the event of a missed call or video call ”. Therefore, you will not be able to initiate chats or calls on your own initiative. Last limitation, “after a few weeks with limited functionality, you will not be able to receive incoming calls or notifications and WhatsApp will stop sending messages and calls to your phone”. because after 120 days of inactivity the account will be deleted automatically, as happens with all inactive accounts (by choice of the user or for another reason, as in this case). “The deletion of the account is not reversible, in what is involved in deleting your message history, deleting your WhatsApp backups and removing your account from all your WhatsApp groups ”, explains the company.
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How to do?
The built-in option in the app is quite limited. It allows you to export only one chat at a time, so third-party tools are emerging, such as iTransor for Whatsapp which works for both iOs and Android and requires the user to first backup the chats via the app. Then the mobile phone is connected to the PC and from here with the program we open the backup to export it in various formats. Only in this way will the backup be ours, readable in every way and cannot be deleted from Whatsapp. Those who are pondering whether to accept the changes know that the topic is now debated and unclear, so much so that in these days the Commissioner of Hamburg for data protection and Freedom of Information (HmbBfDI) has filed proceedings against Facebook Ireland Ltd. asking it not to collect any data from WhatsApp users or to process it for their own purposes. A request explicitly linked to the changes of May 15th. In fact, the German authority considers the content of the announced privacy changes to be obscure.
The Italian Privacy Guarantor has also raised doubts
“We need more clarity on the impact of the privacy changes”, confirms Diego Di Malta, privacy expert lawyer. “It seems that the changes affect business users, who will all be hosted on Facebook servers – he continues. In this case, Facebook, with the privacy news for which it is now asking users for consent, reserves the right to collect user data and use them for marketing purposes, according to what we read on the company’s website “. It must be said that Facebook he wanted to reassure European users, saying that “for now” the sharing of data with Whatsapp in Europe will not be done for the purpose of marketing or improving the service, by virtue of an ongoing dialogue with the guarantors. She must not have been able to reassure the latter, however, given the raising of shields, in search of greater clarity on what actually entails consenting to those news now and in the future.