What Facebook Knows About You From One WhatsApp Convo - Updated

2021 Update: The following article had to be removed from the website hours after being published on April 5, 2014 after going viral. Seven years later, we can see what was already being planned.

As many of my friends started sending me requests to switch to Signal you may be surprised I decided to stay with WhatsApp! Yes, staying with the one claiming to share my information with Facebook.

There is a famous saying that if you are not paying for the product, you are the product, and I absolutely agree. WhatsApp, while changing how billions of people communicate, needs to make money somehow - nothing in life is free.

WhatsApp is changing its terms of service to force users to share personal data including phone numbers and locations with its parent company, Facebook.

Now, one can argue Signal is open source and encrypted due to donations and funding from WhatsApp's founder. The question is whether it can survive the growth to billions of users without needing more cash and monetization strategy (See: Signal Business Model)

Recently, a security expert I met has proven that messages are not the only factor that could be used to know the intention behind updating a terrorist network - listening to the pattern could tell us the same. could this be used by NSO and other agencies? probably yes...

Can Signal take on such agencies? Doubtful!

WhatsApp’s Lawsuit Against NSO in US Federal Court Survives Motion to Dismiss

Thank you Elana Katzor for all your help writing this item

Here is the original item from 2014:

Finally, there’s a dashboard that confirms your wildest suspicions: WhatsApp knows your name, your location, your interests, and even your political leaning. They can know things about you that you may not, like they if certain people respect your opinion (or don’t for that matter) and what preoccupies your thoughts–whether it’s sex, food, shopping, or something a bit more kinky.

WhatsApp has become an omniscient gatekeeper, holding data about you, the personal information you write and receive, and can open the floodgates to the world at their own free will. About a month ago it would have been just 450 million people using WhatsApp, but since Facebook acquired it for a whopping $19 billion, WhatsApp could merge its data with the social media titan very soon—putting your most intimate details at the mercy of the world’s biggest social media platform with 1.3 billion users and counting.

Your Personal Info Just Got Sold

Considering Facebook has over 2 billion connections between local businesses and people, it seems safe to point a finger at advertising as the long-term, overarching objective for acquiring WhatsApp. Plus, the billion-user club may just get a new member: WhatsApp gains millions of users every day and Mark Zuckerberg himself predicts that number will reach 1 billion people in 2015-—allowing Facebook to capitalize on being the global leader in data-driven messaging. If that’s not a jackpot for Facebook, what is?

While money can’t buy happiness, we just learned that it can buy your personal details (and those of millions of others), as Facebook literally bought its way into the hands of WhatsApp's booming user base. Though many raise an eyebrow at why Facebook paid such a premium for a simple cross-platform instant messaging service, if you take a look at this Data Visualization Software, you can get a taste for how much private data one WhatsApp conversation harbors.

This dashboard exposes the information derived from a single (real) WhatsApp conversation over just a month and a half. The data visualizations reveal the waking hours of Jennifer, showing that she is most active around 8:00pm and heads to bed around midnight (making 8pm the best time to flash some commercials, eh?). On an even more personal note, Jennifer may be a real foodie, or struggling with her weight since 39% of her conversation is about food. Maybe she’s a strategic person to push restaurant coupons or the Weight Watcher ads.

What's Revealed in a Single WhatsApp Convo

There’s a variety of categories that Nicole and Jennifer speak about such as computers, Internet, laundry, desserts—a gold mine for advertisers who won’t have to play the guessing game on the personal interests of these ladies. The polarity of Jennifer’s personal thoughts and tone is overwhelmingly positive, and Nicole responds to Jennifer much more than vice versa, identifying Nicole as the influencer in their relationship and possibly a real mover and shaker in her social circle as her opinion commands more respect. 

The most intimate detail exposed during this conversation is that Nicole and Jennifer discuss right wing populism, radical parties, and conservative politics. Whether or not this revelation puts these individuals at risk may depend on the country they are living in, but it certainly exemplifies that the amount of private information obtained from your WhatsApp conversations is limitless and potentially dangerous. 

Is the Promise of Your Privacy Just a Technicality?

In WhatsApp’s privacy policy, it states that it will not sell or share personally identifiable information with third-party companies for commercial or marketing use without consent. But WhatsApp also qualifies that statement, saying it may share personal information with third party service providers, “to the extent that it is reasonably necessary to perform, improve or maintain the WhatsApp Service.” And while WhatsApp claims it won’t use your information for commercial or marketing purposes without consent, it also adds: “except as part of a specific program or feature for which users will have the ability to opt-in or opt-out.”

Bottom line, even though the CEO of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, firmly wrote, "We don't know your likes, what you search for on the Internet, or collect your GPS location,” after looking at this data visualization dashboard, it seems pretty far-fetched. Can you think of a time you took a picture of a beautiful (and identifiable) city skyline or famous monument and sent it to some friends over WhatsApp? Thought so. They can know where you are whenever they want, and they probably do. So, the next time you shoot a WhatsApp message saying “Meet me on 52nd and Broadway”, you may want to think twice.