Last week's decision by Facebook to retrieve whatsapp phone numbers seems to have generated a lot of controversy both in the USA and in Europe. More precisely, the European authorities are monitoring very carefully the way in which the American company intends to take this information from the largest messaging application on the planet.
The French commissioner for the protection of users' data said yesterday that he is monitoring the situation of WhatsApp very carefully and that his European counterparts are doing exactly the same thing. In the middle are the user data, which no longer benefit from the same protection as in the past, and this for Facebook will take over their phone numbers from WhatsApp.
The representative of France claims that every user should have the possibility to control the way in which his data are transmitted by various services or applications. Those at Facebook of course also allow this, so if you are interested you can block the transfer of phone numbers from WhatsApp to Facebook by simply selecting an option.
In this idea, it would be said that the fears of the European authorities are unfounded, but we are talking about a promise broken by Facebook and WhatsApp 2 years after the acquisition. A simple breach of a promise could lead to even more, and this is what the European authorities are trying to prevent at the moment.
"Each European authority will monitor with great vigilance the changes made in WhatsApp's privacy policy. At the heart of the problem is the users' control over their data when it is present in services of this kind."
Basically, Facebook managed to get the attention of the European authorities again, although it probably would not have wanted to receive such attention from them at the moment. Despite this, the company's actions motivate the authorities to investigate everything that happens with the data of users in Europe.
