Facebook today appeared before the US Senate to face the questions over the scandalous data misuse carried out by Cambridge Analytica, which obtained the information of over 50 million users to influence the US Presidential Elections held in 2016. Facebook previously said that it believes Cambridge Analytica got a hold of about 87 million users, however, the latter refuted the charges, saying that it only had a licence for the data of 30 million users. While this snafu is yet to reach a state of mutual understanding between the regulators and Facebook, its other company WhatsApp has now been found to be sharing payments data of the customers with third-party apps viz-a-viz Facebook. WhatsApp currently operates the UPI-based money transfer service available for select users in India under the testing phase.
WhatsApp in its India Payments Privacy Policy explains that it may collect and share the information about the transactions carried out on WhatsApp’s payments platform. The data collected is also shockingly shared with the third-party apps including Facebook, WhatsApp has noted in its policy page.
“We share information with third-party providers and services to help us operate and improve Payments. To send payment instructions to PSPs, maintain your transaction history, provide customer support, and keep our Services safe and secure, including to detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, safety, security, abuse, or other misconduct, we share information we collect under this Payments Privacy Policy with third-party service providers including Facebook” reads one of the clauses of WhatsApp privacy policies.
Further, WhatsApp notes on the same page that it shares information with the third-party services that include payments service provides, or PSPs with the mobile number, registration information, device information, Virtual Payment Address, or VPA. What’s more shocking is that WhatsApp even shares the UPI pin and the amount you share with your contacts using its payments service.
While the other UPI-based services claim to keep the data safe with themselves (with certain fine prints stating the otherwise data sharing with third-party companies), WhatsApp’s privacy policies mar the rules and regulations laid out by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). According to the NPCI, the banks that are associated with the third-party payments services such as WhatsApp, Paytm, and PhonePe need to obtain exclusive permission from the regulator before initiating any data sharing actions.
Facebook last week took a stand to clarify that it collects and stores the minuscule size of data from the users who use WhatsApp. It is noteworthy that WhatsApp was ordained by India’s apex court to restrict the sharing of its users’ data with the parent company Facebook in India. WhatsApp also claims that all the messages exchanged on the platform are end-to-end encrypted, meaning that even WhatsApp does not have access to snoop into the message history.
Facebook is presently embroiled in the global #DeleteFacebook movement joined by many users, including the prominent ones such as Tesla, SpaceX, and Boring Company’s CEO Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton. The social media giant also told the government recently that it about 355 Indian users’ data was compromised in the data harvesting debacle. Facebook has over 200 million users in India.