Last week, the Supreme Court of India asked WhatsApp to reply to a plea that alleged the Facebook-owned messaging platform was lowering standards of its privacy policies for India compared to Europe.
"People have grave apprehensions that they will lose their privacy and it is our duty to protect them," The court bench told WhatsApp as it argued that Europe has special data protection laws which India doesn't. The court also made it clear that social media platforms could not share user data without consent.
In response to this, at least in part, WhatsApp has now put up a blog detailing how it intends to communicate policy changes with users going forward.
In the post, the company pointed to the new status alerts that it has been issuing. Similar to competitors like Snapchat, WhatsApp is now sharing updates directly through WhatsApp's built-in status feature.
WhatsApp will now also show a banner in-app that will allow users to read through the updated policies at their own pace, eventually reminding them to accept the new status quo if they plan to continue using WhatsApp.
It also took a dig at other messaging platforms like Telegram and Signal.
"We’ve seen some of our competitors try to get away with claiming they can’t see people’s messages - if an app doesn’t offer end-to-end encryption by default that means they can read your messages," the company wrote in the post.
"Other apps say they’re better because they know even less information than WhatsApp. We believe people are looking for apps to be both reliable and safe, even if that requires WhatsApp having some limited data. We strive to be thoughtful on the decisions we make and we’ll continue to develop new ways of meeting these responsibilities with less information, not more."
In short, WhatsApp isn't really changing any of the policies, it is just presenting them to you in a softer, less direct way.
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