Avoid Having WhatsApp Pass on Data to Facebook with a VPN

America and EU raising eyebrows

This is raising a lot of dust both in America and Europe, as the US Federal Trade Commission is reviewing a joint complaint accusing Facebook of violating a federal law. The Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy also states that Facebook is indeed violating a directive that clarifies that Facebook itself needs to ask the user’s permission for such a change in their privacy policy, as settled in 2011 with the Federal Trade Commission where the social network told its customers that they could keep all their information private.

On the other side of the Atlantic, concerns have been raised among European regulators regarding the collection of data by Facebook from people’s WhatsApp contacts with the Article 29 Working Party stating that “what’s key is that the individual keeps control over his datawhen these are combined by the big Internet players” which is clearly not happening. The Italian data protection authority also made clear that these privacy policy changes leave them concerned about the protection of millions of users’ privacy.

Avoid WhatsApp shares data with Facebook

Luckily, you don’t have to accept this mid-game rule changing, as WhatsApp doesn’t force you to do it in order to continue using the service. When faced with the “term update” message simply click on “read more” and uncheck the little box.

If you already accepted the new terms of service though, you’ll still have 30 days to opt out. All you need to do is go to your account settings in WhatsApp and disable the “Share My Account Info” option.

Increased encryption and privacy protection