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Article from Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone: Recent developments with social media and messaging apps have caused a lot of confusion. After consulting with professionals, here are a few points that might help clarify matters.
By the rabbi Mordechai Lightstone – Director of Tech Tribe
With recent developments in social media and messaging apps – especially Whatsapp with its changed terms of service – a number of people have reached out to me to clarify what exactly is going on.
And there is a ton of confusion there. So I took a moment to check with the security and privacy professionals in the Tech Tribe community what the best practices with WhatsApp should be. While ultimately based on my personal reading on things, the following is a breakdown of the highlights:
The WhatsApp rule update is unrelated to current political debates.
There is now a lot of talk about recent political developments and their intersection with social media. These issues can be / feel very important. But they are not connected to WhatsApp update.
This is nothing new – WhatsApp has been linked to Facebook since 2016.
Two years after purchasing WhatsApp, Facebook started integrating the app into its ecosystem – sharing metadata and other details like this with its other apps. Facebook is not free, it makes money selling you ads, and it sells ads to you based on the abundant amount of information you share with it. (That’s why you get ads for Birthright)
Every tech company today operates this way. Since 2016, WhatsApp had this integration. The ability to perform a one-time deactivation has ended with this new update. Some privacy policy changes also apply to people who interact with businesses on WhatsApp Business – family and group chats remain unchanged.
Facebook does not read your messages.
Whatsapp continues to use end-to-end encryption. (It uses Signal’s encryption system) So your messages cannot be seen by Mark Zuckerberg. They can be seen by someone looking over your shoulder.
If you really don’t want to share information with Facebook, deleting WhatsApp is not enough!
Since all these apps collect mountains of basic information about us – delete WhatsApp without deleting Instagram, Facebook, Messenger etc. won’t have the desired effect of stopping Facebook from collecting all that juicy data you give them – and messaging on those apps isn’t end-to-end encrypted.
Once we speak, there are many other security features:
Google, Amazon, Apple, that credit card you have to maximize your points. . . they all collect tons of information about you. Did you know that Google can create a map of your destination based on your phone usage? Target was able to find out that a girl was pregnant before telling her family. Are you using two-factor authentication and strong passwords? (ideally something unique for each site – or with a service like Lastpass) There is a lot to know that is of direct importance to your online safety. In my opinion, much is much more important than giving data to Facebook.
There are certainly more solid options:
Signal comes highly recommended by experts. It is always important that there are various application options. If web privacy is your new thing, there are some great options to consider. Telegram does not use your ambient information to sell you advertisements, but is considered less secure than Signal and WhatsApp.
But for your messaging needs, WhatsApp is really suitable for most people:
Really, WhatsApp works well for just about any form of communication you take in it. It has end-to-end encryption and is compliant with data sharing, basically every service we use takes us. There has been no new development in any of these reasons for making new ones.
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