As WhatsApp suffers great loss due to the Tesla CEO's remarks, there's an impending fight back launched by WhatsApp.
According to the Financial Times; Facebook is scrambling to deal with a sudden competitive threat to its messaging platform WhatsApp after a change to its terms of service sparked privacy concerns and prompted users to turn to rivals such as Signal and Telegram in droves.
The encrypted messaging app, which has more than 2bn users globally, and several of its senior executives spent Tuesday trying to clarify forthcoming privacy policy changes covering the data that can be shared between WhatsApp and its parent now that it is deepening its push into ecommerce.
Signal was downloaded 8.8m times worldwide in the week after the WhatsApp changes were first announced on January 4, versus 246,000 times the week before, according to data from Sensor Tower.
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The app also got a boost when Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, tweeted “Use Signal” on January 7.
By contrast, WhatsApp recorded 9.7m downloads in the week after the announcement, compared with 11.3m before, a 14 per cent decrease, Sensor Tower said.
The announcement regarding further use of WhatsApp data in the Facebook mother ship reeked of a classic ‘bait and switch’
Jason Kint, Digital Content Next
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The changes also outline how merchants communicating with customers via WhatsApp can choose to store those chats in Facebook-hosted servers, and use that data to inform their advertising on Facebook. Several top company executives took to Twitter on Tuesday to publicly defend the changes, including Adam Mosseri, chief executive of Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook. “There is a lot of misinformation about the WhatsApp ToS [terms of service] right now,” he said. Still, Jason Kint, chief executive of Digital Content Next, a US trade association for online publishers, noted that Facebook had initially promised that WhatsApp would not be required to share any data with its parent company when it was acquired in 2014.