[ad_1]
Provided reminders from WhatsApp to accept their new privacy policy.
- Facebook needs prior permission from the Information Regulator to cross-process cell phone numbers collected from South Africans, the regulator told the platform.
- Users who have already provided their mobile phone numbers, or the phone numbers of their contacts, cannot give their legal consent to such processing now, the regulator maintains.
- He has also expressed some disgust at the way Facebook is running the European Union, compared to South Africa.
- For more stories, visit www.BusinessInsider.co.za.
South Africa’s Information Regulator (IR) wrote to Facebook South Africa “and provided an analysis of some of the concerns it has” around WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, it said in a statement Wednesday night.
Among other things, he told the social media giant that South African users are simply not in a position to give WhatsApp permission to broadcast cell phone numbers to the rest of Facebook.
The South African Personal Information Protection Act (POPIA) sets strict rules on what companies can (and cannot) do with personal information. For some uses of personal information, the agreement of the users is not sufficient; Prior permission must be requested from the Information Regulator. And what it thinks Facebook is planning around cell phone numbers is one such case, says the IR.
It considers that WhatsApp cannot “legally process any contact information of its users for a purpose other than that for which the number was specifically intended to be collected, with the aim of linking that information together with the information processed by other Facebook companies.”
WhatsApp requires the mobile phone number of a user to register. It also offers a “contact upload” service, an optional feature that allows us to identify which of your contacts in your device’s address book are also WhatsApp users so that we can add them to your WhatsApp contacts and quickly update their contacts from WhatsApp in case your contacts who are not yet using WhatsApp sign up later. “
It doesn’t share user contact books with Facebook, WhatsApp says, and when it receives cell phone numbers for people not yet on its network, it will only “momentarily process” them to create a crypto hash, so that the actual phone number can be discarded, while WhatsApp can still alert you if that person joins.
The IR said it had also raised “as a central concern” the difference in treatment between South African and European users. Although they use the same network and service, residents of the European region technically deal with WhatsApp Ireland, which has a different end-user agreement and privacy policy than WhatsApp LLC, under which South Africa (and the rest of the world) fall. .
Europeans, the IR says, “will receive significantly greater privacy protection than people in South Africa and Africa” from Facebook, even though SA modeled its privacy legislation on that of the European Union.
In February WhatsApp confirmed that users who do not accept its new privacy policy will be prevented from sending or viewing messages after May 15. However, for weeks after that deadline, they will continue to receive notifications about incoming messages, which they can read as soon as they agree to the new terms.
Beyond agreeing to its terms, users have two options, WhatsApp says: delete their own accounts or wait the roughly 120 days it takes for inactive accounts to be automatically deleted.
Facebook says it requires new permissions from WhatsApp users to enable services that businesses will pay to use, making WhatsApp sustainable as a free service for consumers.
(Compiled by Phillip de Wet)
Receive a daily news update on your cell phone. Or receive the best of our site by email
Go to the Business Insider home page for more stories.
[ad_2]
