WhatsApp and Facebook will not share your user information in Europe
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WhatsApp has agreed to stop sharing data with Facebook until both services comply with the next European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will come into force next May. The news comes after the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) concluded an investigation into the two companies to determine whether or not WhatsApp could legally share user data with Facebook under UK law.
ICO report has determined that WhatsApp and Facebook cannot share data beyond basic data processing. France has also ordered to the two companies to stop doing the same, giving them one month.
WhatsApp and Facebook in the spotlight
In August 2016, WhatsApp updated its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy after four years without doing so to ensure that it shares user data with Facebook, its parent company. This movement was not well seen in Europe. In fact, the ICO began to launch an investigation to verify that the two companies were complying with the privacy law. We have now known the results . Italy, France or Germany are also carrying out their own investigations, still in progress.
According to the regulations, WhatsApp can share personal data with Facebook as long as it only offers you a support service. For example, when you are providing the servers to keep the service active. Information from the ICO has concluded that the two companies do not share UK user data for anything other than basic data processing. Commissioner Elizabeth Denham has explained that the ICO had to reach an agreement not to fine the social network The investigation indicates that although WhatsApp tried to transfer data illegally, never actually carried it out.
A WhatsApp spokesperson assured TechCrunch that the messaging service always takes care of the privacy of its users "We collect very little data and every message is end-to-end encrypted.As we have made clear repeatedly over the past year, we are not sharing data in the way the UK Information Commissioner is concerned anywhere in Europe."
