When Facebook acquired WhatsApp for approximately $19 billion in 2014, WhatsApp's co-founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, famously pledged to maintain WhatsApp's commitment to user privacy and an ad-free experience. Koum stated, "Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA." However, this promise began to unravel as early as 2016 when WhatsApp first updated its terms of service to allow for some data sharing with Facebook, primarily for improving Facebook's ad targeting and product experiences. Users were given a brief window to opt out of some of this data sharing, but not all.
The real firestorm erupted in January 2021 when WhatsApp announced a cayman islands phone number list mandatory update to its privacy policy. The update stated that users would have to accept the new terms, including expanded data sharing with Meta, to continue using the service. This triggered a massive public outcry, with many users perceiving it as a forced consent to share their private messages with Facebook for advertising purposes, despite WhatsApp's repeated assurances that personal conversations remained end-to-end encrypted. This misunderstanding led to a significant exodus of users to competing privacy-focused messaging apps like Signal and Telegram.