One question always arrives to your mind when you open whatsapp is that Is your
data safe in WhatsApp ?
From 'Good Morning' messages of the family,
to the fake messages of WhatsApp University,
today, WhatsApp has become the most popular messaging app in the world.
It is a concerning question from the nearly 2 billion active monthly users of this
messaging app. Meaning that 25% of the population of the world
use this one app.
And Safety and data privacy are major concerns in this digital world. Cyber attacks
are on the rise regardless of social media platforms.
So the answer is WhatsApp is relatively more secure than other messaging apps like
Snapchat and Instagram, especially when you enable security features.
Talking about money,initially, there weren't many expenses to run WhatsApp.
They had a small team,they had built a simple app.They weren't spending money on
marketing or running ads.So the biggest expense of running WhatsAp was actually
the cost of sending SMSs.The verification text that WhatsApp sends when a user joins
it ,
Where could they get money for this?
They had received some investments.With their success, more companies wanted to
invest in them.
They would give them money in exchange for their shares.But the investments
weren't exactly pouring in.
So they came up with a new business model.WhatsApp started charging its users
$0.99
about $1 per year,they started charging their users to use this app.You heard it right,
WhatsApp wasn't a free app anymore.They started charging $1.But despite Their
growth continued.By 2011, their app had become the top app in the AppStore.And
people keep on using it.Their $1 Business Model was very successful.
Within 3 yearsWhatsApp became a profitable company.All the money they earned
was spent on their small team So that new features could be added to WhatsApp.The
problems in the software could be rectified.And a reliable messaging app could be
created.They claimed that their product was their passion.And that the users' data
wasn't something that interested them.
That they had no interest in taking users' data.
But after this, Facebook makes an entry in our story.And this Model started crumbling
apart from here.
Mark Zuckerberg was trying to buy WhatsApp since 2012.
But this deal was finalised in February 2014.And WhatsApp is taken over for $19
billion by Facebook.And the employees working in WhatsApp,now became Facebook
employees.
Now investers of facebook starting making presure on mark to make WhatsApp
profitable quickly.In a way where they could earn more money from WhatsApp.
In turn, Mark pressurised the founders of WhatsApp.Fed up with this, the founders of
WhatsAppgave up finally in March 2017,they couldn't take it anymore.Brian Acton
resigned from his job in September 2017.A few months laterJan Koum left WhatsApp
too.Saying that Facebook's opinion on Data Privacy,and the Business Model that
Facebook wants to force on WhatsApp
In January 2021, WhatsApp upgraded its privacy policy and asked users to agree to
accept the new usage terms until February 8, 2021. But due to confusion over the
revised terms, the instant messaging platform had extended the deadline to accept the
terms by May 20, 2021. Also, the company stated that users who do not accept the
new privacy policy, their accounts will not be deleted but their accounts will have
limited functionality, which means they will not be able to send or read messages
from the app.
However the facebook had not implemented all of them means whatsapp can’t read
your messages they are end to end encrypted but still they get some data from
whatsapp for making money.
The information we share with the other Meta Companies includes your account
registration information (such as your phone number), transaction data (for example,
if you use Facebook Pay or Shops in WhatsApp), service-related information,
information on how you interact with businesses when using our Services, mobile
device information, your IP address, and may include other information identified in
the Privacy Policy section entitled ‘Information We Collect’ or obtained upon notice
to you or based on your consent.
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data",[1] but not the content
of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct
types of metadata, including:
There are many meta data such as structural discriptive