WhatsApp said earlier in the week that it’ll allow users to review its planned privacy update at “their own pace” and can display a banner to raised explain the changes in its terms. But what happens to its users who don’t accept the terms by the May 15 deadline?
In an email to at least one of its merchant partners, reviewed by TechCrunch, Facebook-owned WhatsApp said it’ll “slowly ask” such users to suits the new terms “in order to possess full functionality of WhatsApp” starting May 15.
The corporate added a note saying that if they still don’t accept the terms, for a brief time, these users are going to be ready to receive calls and notifications, but they won’t be able to send or receive any messages from the app. The corporate confirmed to TechCrunch that the note accurately characterizes its plan.
“Short time” in the note means a couple of weeks. Within the note, WhatsApp linked to a newly created FAQ page that says its policy associated with inactive users will apply after May 15.
WhatsApp’s inactive policy states that users whose accounts are “generally deleted after 120 days of inactivity.”
The instant messaging service received backlash from a number of its users — including those in India, its biggest market — last month after an in-app alert said that they had until February 8 to comply with the planned privacy terms, which are being made to reflect its recent push into e-commerce, if they wished to continue using the service.
Following backlash, WhatsApp said its planned privacy update had created confusion among a number of its users. Number of people have their own reviews about the proportion of confusion with the recent update. There’ has been numerous wrong information causing concern and that we want to assist everyone understand our principles and therefore the facts,” it wrote during a blog post last month.
To share with Facebook, the privacy policy of WhatsApp in 2016 have granted service permissions to certain metadata like user phone numbers and device information. The new terms will allow Facebook and WhatsApp to share payment and transaction data so as to assist them better target ads because the social juggernaut broadens its e-commerce offerings and appears to merge its messaging platforms.
WhatsApp, employed by over 2 billion users, last month delayed enforcing the new policy by three months and has been explaining its terms to users ever since — though its explanations hadn’t explicitly addressed what it planned to take action with users who didn’t accept the terms.
