Chris

Since the first Delete WhatsApp Day, Meta has invested millions in large-scale marketing campaigns, trying to convince Internet users that WhatsApp is a privacy-respecting service. It is not. Quite the opposite: Like Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp requires users to disclose personally identifiable information, such as their phone number. For this reason, Meta is able to identify users across different services and combine their data from various platforms into comprehensive user profiles. On top of that, there are tools that are capable of gathering data outside of Meta’s services, e.g., the Facebook plugin, which, when integrated into third-party websites, can track Internet users’ browsing behavior beyond Meta’s domain. By systematically collecting user data from different sources, it is possible to draw a picture of an individual user that’s far more detailed and much more accurate than one that’s merely based on message content. The chat metadata (i.e., information about who communicates with whom, when, where, etc.) that accumulates when using WhatsApp translates to a comprehensive “social graph,” which is quite revealing in and of itself. “Likes” on Facebook and Instagram not only reflect users’ interests and their preferences, further information – such as age and income class, marital status, or sexual orientation – can also be inferred from collections of such data points. By combining the obtained information, matching it against the social graph, and supplementing it with attributes of close contacts, the whole data set becomes much more than the sum of its parts and speaks volumes about the user it’s associated with.

Cool cool cool. 🫠