Once, a long time ago when Whatsapp was independent, their founders wrote:
We knew that we could charge people directly if we could do all those things. We knew we could do what most people aim to do every day: avoid ads. No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow.
The company they did NOT want to become? One where
…their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.
But this week in 2021, Whatsapp backed away, temporarily, from a change in their privacy policy. Newspaper ads clarifying the change didn’t work well enough, so we’re now at another blog post:
… we don’t keep logs of who everyone’s messaging or calling. We also can’t see your shared location and we don’t share your contacts with Facebook. his update does not expand our ability to share data with Facebook… we’re also going to do a lot more to clear up the misinformation around how privacy and security works on WhatsApp…
This is a company, sold by its founders to Facebook, now having to fight against the widespread perception that its a siphon for data to its parent.
That 2012 blog post, which quoted Fight Club, was a glimpse of an alternate way the decade could have unfolded: one where Whatsapp made money and the mere act of people writing and talking with each other wouldn’t be a stream of activity and metadata.