WhatsApp will not delete your account even if you don’t accept new privacy policy by May 15

KEY STORY

• After much hullabaloo, WhatsApp has scrapped the idea of forcing its users to accept the new privacy policy by May 15. The Facebook-owned messaging app had earlier made it mandatory for all users to accept the new policies by May 15 to continue using the services.

• However, as per the latest reports, the company will no longer ask its users to accept it, and not accepting the policies will not lead to the deletion of accounts. WhatsApp has been at the receiving end of users ever since it had introduced the new privacy policies.

• A WhatsApp spokesperson had said in a statement that no user will lose access to their WhatsApp account even if they do not accept the new terms and policies after the May 15 deadline.

• “While the majority of users who have received the new terms of service have accepted them, we appreciate some people haven’t had the chance to do so yet. No accounts will be deleted on May 15 because of this update and no one will lose the functionality of WhatsApp either. We will follow up with reminders to people over the next several weeks,” the company said.

• The new development does not entirely mean that users can get away by not accepting the new privacy policy. It simply means that WhatsApp is pushing the deadline. The statement also says that WhatsApp will keep sending reminders for a few more weeks but nobody, for now, will lose access to their accounts even if they do not accept the new privacy policy immediately.

• WhatsApp had first decided to roll out the new terms of service and privacy policy on February 8 but looking at the kind of response it received from users, the company had to postpone the deadline to May 15. There was very little information about what the new privacy policy truly means for users.

CONCLUSION

• It was being assumed that WhatsApp will share private information, chats of users with Facebook, and because of the ambiguity around new policies, several users migrated to other messaging apps like Signal and Telegram. However, WhatsApp tried to clear the air about its new terms of service through various campaigns and gave a lot of time to users to understand what it truly means.

• The Facebook-owned messaging app through its statuses informed users that the chats are end-to-end encrypted and not even WhatsApp can access them. The chats can only be accessed by the sender and the receiver.