I refused WhatsApp’s new privacy policy for almost 4 years — here’s what happened

For nearly four years, I have avoided accepting WhatsApp’s updated privacy policy, and although some of the app’s functionality is unavailable to me, all its basic features have continued working.

On 7 January 2021, WhatsApp’s Android and iOS apps displayed a notification informing users that it was updating its privacy policy.

It also presented an ultimatum — accept the new terms within a month or stop using WhatsApp.

In addition to misstepping by coming across as aggressive, WhatsApp’s notice muddled what the privacy policy change was actually about.

The original notice stated that two of the key updates included how WhatsApp shares people’s private data with its parent company, Facebook.

One change was to facilitate businesses using Facebook-hosted services to store and manage their WhatsApp chats.

The more concerning amendment was about how WhatsApp partners with Facebook to offer integrations across the Facebook Company (now Meta Platforms) products.

This led people to dig through the privacy policy, where they found wording stating that WhatsApp receives information from and shares information with the Facebook family of companies.

“We may use the information we receive from them, and they may use the information we share with them, to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our services and their offerings,” it stated.

Despite assuring that people’s chats would remain end-to-end encrypted and that WhatsApp could not read the contents of messages or share them with Facebook, the backlash was swift and fierce.

Facebook moved quickly to try and calm the situation by assuring that the change was only about business messaging.

“There will be no change in data sharing with Facebook for non-business chats and account information, and with regard to business messaging, we are not mandating users to share data,” the company assured.

“As we’ve said previously, we are updating our terms of service and privacy policy as we work to make WhatsApp a great way to get answers or help from a business. We’re providing users with ample notice to review the changes.”

Facebook said the main thing users should keep in mind about its new policy is that when messaging a business, they will now have the option to use Facebook’s cloud infrastructure to store their WhatsApp chats.

“Every user will be notified within the chat if the business they are talking to has chosen to use Facebook’s secure hosting infrastructure to store their WhatsApp messages,” said Facebook.

“People do not have to message or interact with businesses on WhatsApp if they choose not to do so,” it added.

“Users can also still easily block a business on WhatsApp if they want.”

Facebook’s assurances did not diminish the negative sentiment about the change — especially the ultimatum.

Rival platforms like Telegram and Signal saw a surge in new sign-ups, and privacy and data regulators worldwide began investigating whether issuing users with such an ultimatum was legal.

South Africa’s Information Regulator also weighed in on the matter, saying that Facebook should adopt the same approach here as it had under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.

This meant users should be allowed to opt out of accepting the new privacy policy without losing access to WhatsApp entirely.

They should be able to continue using the existing functionality under the old privacy policy they had already opted into without being strongarmed into accepting new terms and conditions.

As a result of the backlash, Facebook initially extended the deadline for accepting the new terms from 8 February to 15 May 2021.

WhatsApp warned that users who did not accept the new policy would systematically lose functionality after the deadline.

In its original support page regarding the policy, the company said if users had not accepted its new policy “after a period of several weeks”, the notification requesting their acceptance would eventually become persistent.

Thereafter, they would lose access to their chat list and be unable to open or respond to any messages.

After weeks of limited functionality, users would not receive incoming calls or notifications from WhatsApp.

However, this never happened, and by September, WhatsApp had caved and allowed users to keep using the platform even if they didn’t accept the new terms.

Rather than cutting those users off, WhatsApp said they could not communicate with businesses that use Facebook’s hosting until they accept the new privacy policy.

Not mentioned in WhatsApp support pages was that it would regularly nag users to accept the new privacy policy every other day for more than a year.

This came in the form of a modal popup window displayed over your list of active chats that you had to dismiss or accept before you could continue.

It has since stopped doing this. I can no longer remember when I last saw the popup.

True to its word, WhatsApp blocks you from chatting with business accounts that store messages on Facebook’s (now Meta’s) cloud hosting service.

It prompts you to accept the new privacy policy. If you don’t, you can’t chat to the business account.

An example of what this looks like is shown in the screenshots above.

The only other major feature I am missing out on is interacting with Meta AI from within WhatsApp.

Although I could initially generate text and images using the large language model, WhatsApp cut me off some months after the initial launch with the same old prompt from 2021, just recoloured from blue to green.

Happily, I have not been blocked from using most other features that have rolled out over the years, like Channels and Communities.

Although WhatsApp’s near-daily nagging to accept its new terms and privacy policy between 2021 and 2023 was tiresome, I was able to continue using the service uninterrupted.

WhatsApp has also not locked any features behind accepting the new privacy policy unless they require messages to be stored or processed on Facebook’s servers.