Facebook Ordered to Delete WhatsApp User Data by German Regulator
Facebook Ordered to Delete WhatsApp User Data by German Regulator
On Tuesday A German privacy regulator ordered Facebook to stop gathering and storing data of German users of its messaging app WhatsApp and to delete all data that has already been forwarded to it.
The regulator also called for the social network to remove all information already forwarded from WhatsApp on roughly 35 million German users.
“It has to be their decision, whether they want to connect their account with Facebook,” Johannes Caspar, the Hamburg data protection commissioner,said in a statement. “Therefore, Facebook has to ask for their permission in advance. This has not happened.”
As per The Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, Facebook has been invading the data protection law and has not yet obtained the right in the form of an approval to collect WhatsApp users’ data. According to the newest statistic, there is a total of 35 million WhatsApp users living in Germany at this current time.
“After the acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook two years ago, both parties have publicly assured that data will not be shared between them,” commissioner Johannes Caspar said in a statement.
“The fact that this is now happening is not only a misleading of their users and the public but also constitutes an infringement of national data protection law,” Caspar added.
WhatsApp’s plan to share user information with Facebook instantly raised concerns among privacy regulators in Europe when it was declared last month. The Article 29 Working Party, a body representing the European Union’s 28 national data-protection authorities, at the time, said its members were inspecting the WhatsApp change of terms “with great vigilance.”
The data watchdog said WhatsApp and Facebook were independent companies that should process their users’ data based on their own terms and conditions and data privacy policies.
The Hamburg commissioner’s move comes after EU and US regulators said they would scrutinize changes to privacy settings that WhatsApp made in August.
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