Facebook-owned chat app WhatsApp has been in a hot seat for the last couple of weeks.
The application chose to renew its privacy policies, and in usual big tech style, the changes were extensive and could not be understood by a normal user.
In that mix, a lot of misinformation, the app said in a statement, was spread, sparking a panic that saw millions of its users exit the app for other solutions such as Signal and Telegram.
Signal has been lauded for its strict approach to privacy and encryption and even received a shoutout from Tesla CEO Elon Musk. What would follow is that the once rarely used platform (with a couple of millions of users) shot through the ranks in terms of downloads, and as of last week had recorded +50 million downloads.
Telegram added million of users too (+90 million), and surpassed the 500M mark in Play Store downloads.
These numbers demonstrate that WhatsApp and its association with Facebook is a relationship that people don’t trust anymore – and this is an issue that can be traced to years of alleged user data abuse, as well as cases of data misuse as we saw during the Cambridge Analytica saga.
Nevertheless, the talented folks at Gizmodo excellently summed up WhatsApp’s plan all along in this interesting and eye-opening post.
With that in mind, WhatsApp seems to be embarking on proper user information announcements, a segment that the majority of people would agree that the app has badly handled. And that bad information flow management saw it pause the privacy update to a future date.
This time around, the giant chat app will from today and onwards, apprise users of new features and its commitment to user privacy via the popular feature, Status.
‘WhatsApp is now on Status. We’ll let you know about new features and updates here… Stay tuned for more updates.’
The Status features was introduced back in early 2017. It is a remake of Snapchat’s Stories features, which Facebook has since cloned for its apps, among other big applications such as LinkedIn and recently, Twitter (Fleets).
