Facebook and WhatsApp have been issued with formal notices by France’s data protection watchdog warning that data transfers being carried out for ‘business intelligence’ purposes currently lack a legal basis — and consequently that Facebook Inc, WhatsApp’s owner, has violated the French Data Protection Act.
WhatsApp has been given a month to remedy the situation or could face additional investigation by the CNIL — and the potential for a sanction to be issued against it in future.
In August 2016 the social networking giant caused massive controversy when its messaging platform WhatsApp announced a privacy U-turn — saying it would shortly begin sharing user data with its parent, Facebook, and Facebook’s network of companies, despite the founder’s prior publicly stated stance that user privacy would never be compromised as a result of the Facebook acquisition.
WhatsApp’s founder, Jan Koum, had also assured users that ads would not be added to the platform. However the data-sharing arrangement with Facebook included “ad-targeting purposes” among its listed reasons.
Users were offered an opt-out, but only a time-limited one — which also required they actively read through terms & conditions to find and uncheck a default-checked box to prevent information such as their mobile phone number being shared with Facebook for ad targeting (shared phone numbers enabling the company to link a user’s Facebook profile and activity with their WhatsApp account).
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