Mark Zuckerberg defends WhatsApp’s privacy update, takes shot at rivals

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended WhatsApp’s new privacy policy on its quarterly earnings call on Wednesday and took potshots at competitors including Apple for allegedly making misleading claims.

Earlier in the month, WhatsApp unveiled a new privacy policy update that allows it to share extensive metadata and business chats with parent Facebook. This information can be used by it for targetted advertising. After the update faced a backlash from privacy and security experts and led to an increase in downloads of smaller rival apps like Signal, WhatsApp pushed back the implementation by three months to May 2021.

“First and foremost, people care if their conversations stay private, but after that, people also care about safety and other convenience too. And from this perspective, WhatsApp and the direction that we’re heading in with Messenger are the best private social apps available. Now, we have a lot of competitors who make claims about privacy that are often misleading,” Zuckerberg said.