WhatsApp users who in 2016 opted out of sharing data with third parties are now being asked by Facebook to either accept a privacy policy that states their metadata can be shared with third parties or stop chatting with friends and family through their app.

A poster bellow in this thread quoted a Wired article where some FB representative says they will "honor" the opt-out, yet this is not stated anywhere in the privacy policy as far as I can tell. I think it would be trivial for Facebook to make this clear in their new policy.

I believe the sharing only applies when talking to those third parties. E.g., if you only ever talk to friends and family, there is effectively no change.

They are boiling a frog. It is naive to think they will stop here.

People's naivety never cease to amaze me.

At least part of the outrage is that, while that use is quite reasonable, the TOS did not constrain the sharing to only that use.

So they were saying one thing in legal terms (we can share your data with facebook to improve facebook products) and another elsewhere (we will only share minimal data about and with businesses you communicate with, within this feature).

Personally I trust them to adhere to their TOS far more than their newsroom blog. So while I believe their short-term plans are reasonable, in the long-term Facebook has demonstrated repeatedly that they will do whatever they can get away with.

The outrage is due to Facebook being involved. No one (very rightfully) trusts Facebook with their data. I doubt there would have been any outrage at this level if an independent WhatsApp was doing this.

> The outrage is due to Facebook being involved.

Does that make spreading what's effectively disinformation ok, though?

I'd argue that there are more than enough angles to legitimately criticize Facebook. Why make one up?

No, it's legitimate to be a WhatsApp user and to not want Facebook to have more of your data.

How is Facebook having more of my data in this scenario?

Only if I'm talking a business on WhatsApp (which is optional and will hopefully stay that way), and only if the business I'm talking to uses Facebook as a service provider (instead of, say, Twilio or a self-hosted solution) does something change for me.

Facebook has indicated that businesses processing chats through Facebook will be clearly indicated as doing so, which hopefully puts enough pressure on businesses respecting their customers' privacy to not do so.

Businesses not respecting people's privacy can already choose to share arbitrary data with Facebook for advertisement purposes, so what changes?

Now if Facebook was to discontinue the existing E2E-encrypted business chat integration, that would be something to get upset about.

I'm really afraid that the only lesson that Facebook (and others) have learned in all of this is that TOS changes are best hidden in the fine print of opting into some user-visible new feature via some dark UX pattern, like e.g. Google commonly does.

But it this the TOS you are signing here?

No it is not.

Does it say there is some sort of opt in to a business conversation, not only now but in the future? No.

So, you are giving Facebook the right to sell your private conversations to third parties in the future, but you think it’s not an issue because you trust ... checks notes... Facebook?

Really?

> So, you are giving Facebook the right to sell your private conversations to third parties in the future

Where in the new TOS does it say that?

> Yeah I don't understand the outrage?

Same here. Don't get me wrong, I'm as deeply suspicious of everything that Facebook touches as the next person.

But here Facebook is seemingly doing a pretty normal/expected thing, and people (and more or less reputable news sources) portray it as a data-privacy scandal?

What's worst is that at least in my country, at least half of all articles about this were mentioning Telegram as a "secure, encrypted alternative to WhatsApp". This makes me very sad.