Facebook has built itself into a linchpin platform with messaging, livestreaming, virtual reality and many other digital services. The outage lasted over five hours, before some apps slowly flickered back to life, though the company cautioned the services would take time to stabilize.Įven so, the impact was far-reaching and severe. Within minutes, Facebook had disappeared from the internet. Note that your WhatsApp information will still be passed to Facebook for other purposes such as “improving infrastructure and delivery systems, understanding how services.are used, securing systems, and fighting spam, abuse, or infringement activities." Changing your settings does ensure, however, that Facebook will not use your WhatsApp data to suggest friends or serve ads.SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, were inaccessible for hours on Monday, taking out a vital communications platform used by billions and showcasing just how dependent the world has become on a company that is under intense scrutiny.įacebook’s apps - which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus - began displaying error messages around 11:40 a.m.
You can click the arrow in the top left to get back to your settings and then to your normal WhatsApp homepage. Your screen should look like this, with “Share my account info” greyed out. A grey pop-up box will ask if you are sure you don’t want WhatsApp to share your data with Facebook. Toggle “Share my account info” to the left. Use the three dots in the upper right of your screen to navigate to “Settings” and click “Account.” If you already agreed to the new privacy policy and would like to undo it, you have 30 additional days after you clicked “Agree” to change your settings to “Don’t share” once and for all. Now that your screen looks like this, click “Agree.” This will direct you back to your normal WhatsApp homepage.
Once you uncheck the box, you will see this pop-up box confirming that your account information won’t be used on Facebook. At the bottom of the screen, uncheck the box for “Share my WhatsApp information with Facebook…” This takes you to more information about the new privacy policy.
When you open WhatsApp on your phone, you will see this update screen. Until then, see below for steps to change your account settings and keep your WhatsApp data on WhatsApp. We urge WhatsApp to make available settings and options more obvious to users.
Unfortunately, WhatsApp’s UI does not offer clear information about what the new privacy policy will change, and buries mechanisms for opting out. įrom the first time you see the privacy policy update screen on WhatsApp, you have 30 days to click through and agree or not agree to Facebook using your WhatsApp data to suggest friends and serve ads. We describe details of this data sharing arrangement and the new privacy policy that makes it possible in a previous bl og post. WhatsApp’s plans to share user information-including phone numbers and usage data-with parent company Facebook threaten users’ privacy and control over their data. We have also clarified that, while the new privacy policy permits WhatsApp to share contact lists with Facebook, no concrete plans to do so have been announced. UPDATE (9/12/16): We have clarified that users have 30 days after they first see WhatsApp's privacy policy update to agree or not agree to its terms.