Facebook has been accused of misleading the European Commission over its $22 billion takeover of WhatsApp in 2014—when the Mark Zuckerberg-run company claimed that it wouldn’t be able to knit together user IDs, thereby combining the data of the two services. Brussels’ competition officials issued a charge sheet against Facebook on Tuesday, in which it is alleged that the free content ad network failed...
A ruling to protect German WhatsApp users’ data from Facebook suggests that the EU bloc will not back down on protecting consumers’ data privacy, despite an earlier win by Facebook in a Belgian appeal case. This summer, the Brussels Court of Appeals decided to reverse an earlier ruling restricting Facebook from tracking non-Facebook users in Belgium through the use of cookies. The new ruling...
Facebook has been ordered to stop collecting and storing data on WhatsApp users in Germany, marking the first regulatory challenge to a controversial data-sharing scheme that the social media company announced in August. In a statement published Tuesday, Germany’s privacy watchdog said that sharing WhatsApp user data with Facebook, the messaging app’s parent company, constitutes “an infringement of national data protection law.” The regulatory body also...
When WhatsApp, the messaging app, launched in 2009, it struck me as one of the most interesting innovations I’d seen in ages – for two reasons. The first was that it seemed beautifully designed from the outset: it was clean, minimalist and efficient; and, secondly, it had a business model that did not depend on advertising. Instead, users got a year free, after which...
Chat logs from WhatsApp linger on your phone even after you’ve deleted them, according to new research published by iOS expert Jonathan Zdziarski. Forensic traces of chats linger on the phone even after a user archives or deletes them, Zdziarski found, and could be accessed by someone with physical access to the device or by law enforcement issuing a warrant to Apple for iCloud backups....
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