They want to provide better targeted advertising to you through all of their platforms. If you go onto Google to look for a shop or gym, you'll see against the company listing the opening hours and the 'traffic' flow in the shop or gym so you can see what time of day they are busy and make plans to go at quieter times.Īdvertising is another area where data sharing is used and this is one of the predominant cases where Facebook wants the data. This information is coming from data sharing that comes from mobile phones and traffic cameras. If you do use these, you will see data around traffic flow/traffic jams. I'll say it again, there has to be a quid-pro-quo here. They want to give their shareholders dividends, they want to pay their staff. They provide it because they want to make a profit. It costs millions, and we have to be realistic, the companies who run these services for us, don't do it because they want to provide a public service. You don't run an operation of that size for £10 a month. The costs of running these services is not cheap, we are talking about large scale enterprise level services, with disaster recovery, spread around the world. I like to get things for free, but I realise there is always some form of payment to be made.

We want to use the excellent capabilities of WhatsApp to message, call, send pictures to our friends and colleagues, but we want to do that for free. The user data that could be shared with Facebook includes WhatsApp account registration, phone numbers, transaction data, service-related information, interaction information, mobile device information, IP address, and ‘other information identified… or obtained upon notice to you or based on your consent.’įacebook’s reasons for requiring the data aren’t entirely clear, but Facebook claims it is for ‘understanding how our services or are used’, ‘improving their services’, ‘making suggestions for you’, ‘personalizing features and content’ and ‘showing relevant offers and ads across the Facebook Company Products Something For Nothing

So these are people who already have and share lots of information with Facebook and are worried about some extra WhatsApp details being shared. Strangely, most of the complaints I've seen have been appearing on Facebook. This week I've seen lots of posts on social media platforms about the changes taking place on WhatsApp with the company stating that going forwards they will be sharing user details with Facebook.

Whatsapp inc data shared by 2 apps