Carisa Lee

From Feb­ru­ary 8, busi­ness­es that use What­sApp will be man­dat­ed to ac­cept the plat­form’s lat­est pri­va­cy pol­i­cy change.

It’s a move for which the mes­sag­ing plat­form has been crit­i­cised, es­pe­cial­ly since fail­ure to ac­cept the change will re­sult in the de­ac­ti­va­tion of the busi­ness ac­count.

There have been re­ports of users in In­dia and Turkey de­ac­ti­vat­ing the Face­book-owned app in large num­bers and us­ing al­ter­na­tives such as Slack, Telegram and Sig­nal as pri­va­cy con­cerns in­crease.

Here in T&T peo­ple have an­nounced their move to oth­er apps.

“I’ve al­ready start­ed the process of switch­ing to telegram,” El­li­mac wrote on Face­book.

But ac­cord­ing to Cy­ber­SafeTT Dig­i­tal An­thro­pol­o­gist Daren Dho­ray, this change does not mean that users should delete the app and move to an­oth­er.

“At least not yet,” he said.

Dho­ray said peo­ple should be con­cerned about the app’s pri­va­cy pol­i­cy, but said this change will not en­croach up­on that of the reg­u­lar user.

“More im­por­tant­ly your per­son­al chat mes­sages with friends and fam­i­ly will con­tin­ue to be se­cure and this is re­al­ly be­cause of What­sApp’s end-to-end en­cryp­tion fea­ture which is some­thing im­por­tant to note,” he ex­plained.

He said the same da­ta What­sApp is gath­er­ing from users now will con­tin­ue and hard­ly any­thing will change.

The Dig­i­tal An­thro­pol­o­gist told Guardian Me­dia that mis­in­for­ma­tion is part­ly the cause for peo­ple leav­ing the app es­pe­cial­ly since this change was not for per­son­al ac­counts.

“This is the part that a lot of peo­ple are ig­nor­ing. It’s re­al­ly geared to­wards the What­sApp’s Busi­ness Com­mu­ni­ty,” he said.

In an of­fi­cial state­ment What­sApp wrote, “As we an­nounced in Oc­to­ber, What­sApp wants to make it eas­i­er for peo­ple to both make a pur­chase and get help from a busi­ness di­rect­ly on What­sApp. While most peo­ple use What­sApp to chat with friends and fam­i­ly, in­creas­ing­ly peo­ple are reach­ing out to busi­ness­es as well.”

Dho­ray said even with the up­roar come Feb­ru­ary 8 there will not be an im­me­di­ate change and he was not sure if this coun­try would have all the fea­tures.

“What Face­book en­vi­sions is What­sApp to con­duct busi­ness in the same way it has been do­ing on the Face­book plat­form, so I can ac­tu­al­ly en­gage with a busi­ness own­er on What­sApp and they could send me a cat­a­logue where I can browse their prod­ucts and even click buy,” he elab­o­rat­ed.

“They be­lieve that if they show you ads or con­tent based on things that you searched for in the past then you would be more like­ly to pur­chase,” he con­tin­ued.

Af­ter What­sApp’s an­nounce­ment Tes­la’s Elon Musk, on Twit­ter rec­om­mend­ed the app Sig­nal over What­sApp.

But Dho­ray said de­spite Musk’s an­nounce­ment many com­pa­nies wel­comed the change.

“It’s re­al­ly be­cause What­sApp is mov­ing away from sim­ply be­ing a chat tool to a full-fledge E-com­merce plat­form and would you be­lieve many busi­ness­es are look­ing for­ward to this re­lease par­tic­u­lar­ly in this time of COVID,” he said.

How­ev­er, the Tech ex­pert said the mes­sag­ing com­pa­ny erred with the lan­guage used for the an­nounce­ment and said it came across as, “force­ful”.

“You will have the op­tion to put it off un­til Feb­ru­ary 8, how­ev­er, on that date you will have to say yes or no... the no­ti­fi­ca­tion clear­ly states that if you don’t ac­cept you will have to delete your ac­count,” he said.

He said users will not see any­thing dif­fer­ent as yet as this just an up­date for things to hap­pen.

“I would say just press okay,” he ad­vised.

Dho­ray said he has ac­counts on sev­er­al mes­sag­ing ap­pli­ca­tions and en­cour­ages oth­ers to do the same, but said mov­ing busi­ness to an­oth­er app may af­fect one’s com­pa­ny.

“You will ob­vi­ous­ly want to con­sid­er whether or not your cus­tomers have moved from What­sApp to that plat­form so you could con­tin­ue mes­sag­ing them. You could even dri­ve away cus­tomers,” he ex­plained.