In the post “Why I Am Quitting WhatsApp – Part II” below I mention a link to the Terms of Services and the Privacy Policy. Since those terms change with time, I enclose an excerpt below of the terms as of 27 March 2021 in pdf format.
The clause “Information We Collect” is divided into three groups:
- Information you provide (hinting that the other two are information that you do NOT (and may not want to) provide),
- Automatically collected information,
- Third-party information.
Please see content below.
Information You Provide
• Your Account Information. You provide your mobile phone number to create a WhatsApp account. You provide us the phone numbers in your mobile address book on a regular basis, including those of both the users of our Services and your other contacts. You confirm you are authorized to provide us such numbers. You may also add other information to your account, such as a profile name, profile picture, and status message.
• Your Messages. We do not retain your messages in the ordinary course of providing our Services to you. Once your messages (including your chats, photos, videos, voice messages, files, and share location information) are delivered, they are deleted from our servers. Your messages are stored on your own device. If a message cannot be delivered immediately (for example, if you are offline), we may keep it on our servers for up to 30 days as we try to deliver it. If a message is still undelivered after 30 days, we delete it. To improve performance and deliver media messages more efficiently, such as when many people are sharing a popular photo or video, we may retain that content on our servers for a longer period of time. We also offer end-to-end encryption for our Services, which is on by default, when you and the people with whom you message use a version of our app released after April 2, 2016. End-to-end encryption means that your messages are encrypted to protect against us and third parties from reading them.
• Your Connections. To help you organize how you communicate with others, we may create a favorites list of your contacts for you, and you can create, join, or get added to groups and broadcast lists, and such groups and lists get associated with your account information.
• Customer Support. You may provide us with information related to your use of our Services, including copies of your messages, and how to contact you so we can provide you customer support. For example, you may send us an email with information relating to our app performance or other issues.
Automatically Collected Information
• Usage and Log Information. We collect service-related, diagnostic, and performance information. This includes information about your activity (such as how you use our Services, how you interact with others using our Services, and the like), log files, and diagnostic, crash, website, and performance logs and reports.
• Transactional Information. If you pay for our Services, we may receive information and confirmations, such as payment receipts, including from app stores or other third parties processing your payment.
• Device and Connection Information. We collect device-specific information when you install, access, or use our Services. This includes information such as hardware model, operating system information, browser information, IP address, mobile network information including phone number, and device identifiers. We collect device location information if you use our location features, such as when you choose to share your location with your contacts, view locations nearby or those others have shared with you, and the like, and for diagnostics and troubleshooting purposes such as if you are having trouble with our app’s location features.
• Cookies. We use cookies to operate and provide our Services, including to provide our Services that are web-based, improve your experiences, understand how our Services are being used, and customize our Services. For example, we use cookies to provide WhatsApp for web and desktop and other web-based services. We may also use cookies to understand which of our FAQs are most popular and to show you relevant content related to our Services. Additionally, we may use cookies to remember your choices, such as your language preferences, and otherwise to customize our Services for you. Learn more about how we use cookies to provide you our Services.
• Status Information. We collect information about your online and status message changes on our Services, such as whether you are online (your “online status”), when you last used our Services (your “last seen status”), and when you last updated your status message.
Third-Party Information
• Information Others Provide About You. We receive information other people provide us, which may include information about you. For example, when other users you know use our Services, they may provide your phone number from their mobile address book (just as you may provide theirs), or they may send you a message, send messages to groups to which you belong, or call you.
• Third-Party Providers. We work with third-party providers to help us operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services. For example, we work with companies to distribute our apps, provide our infrastructure, delivery, and other systems, supply map and places information, process payments, help us understand how people use our Services, and market our Services. These providers may provide us information about you in certain circumstances; for example, app stores may provide us reports to help us diagnose and fix service issues.
• Third-Party Services. We allow you to use our Services in connection with third-party services. If you use our Services with such third-party services, we may receive information about you from them; for example, if you use the WhatsApp share button on a news service to share a news article with your WhatsApp contacts, groups, or broadcast lists on our Services, or if you choose to access our Services through a mobile carrier’s or device provider’s promotion of our Services. Please note that when you use third-party services, their own terms and privacy policies will govern your use of those services.
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