What has been one of the biggest success stories in messaging has been facing fire from Canadian and Dutch data protection authorities for forcing its users to reveal their complete contact list. According to reports, they have been charged for copying phone numbers to their servers, even of those users who do not use the service.
The fact that users have to grant access to their entire address book while installing the app has made the authorities suspicious because it also breaches privacy laws in both the respective countries in question. “This lack of choice contravenes (Canadian and Dutch) privacy law. Both users and non-users should have control over their personal data and users must be able to freely decide what contact details they wish to share with WhatsApp,” said Jacob Kohnstamm, Chairman of the Dutch Data Protection Authority, as told to Reuters India.
According to ZDNet however, Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said that WhatsApp was willing to comply with whatever recommendations they had made. Actually they had already implemented quite a few recommendations that were made earlier, like patching vulnerabilities and introducing encryption into their service to prevent the possibility of eavesdropping of unencrypted messages on open wifi networks.
As of now only iOS 6 users can manually add contacts to this service. Though Whatsapp has commited to make changes to its application in order to ensure privacy of its users, it has not commented on when this option will be made available to users on other platforms. Both the agencies have said that they will be imposing fines if it continues to flout the privacy norms in their respective countries.
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