The announcement of the data protection change on WhatsApp leads many users to switch messengers.
A trend towards the ICQ messenger is now emerging in Asia.
Hong Kong - The mobile messenger application
recently attracted criticism and boycott by
announcing
a change in
data protection
.
Accordingly, more data should be transmitted to the
parent company Facebook
.
Users: inside outside
Europe
who do not agree by February 8th should be
blocked
on the
app
.
This led to a number of users switching between
messengers
.
Competitors
Telegram
and
Signal
recorded millions of new downloads.
But even a well-known
messenger
seems to be enjoying
its
popularity again:
ICQ
actually experienced its heyday as a desktop application between the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s.
About a year ago it finally made a comeback as a
smartphone app
.
In
Hong Kong
is now a trend is emerging:
ICQ
climbed outright the
app
-charts upward, as
The Wall Street Journal
reported.
The number of downloads increased 35 times within a week.
However, this is probably not the hope of better
data protection
than
, but simply nostalgia.
Because
ICQ
is not exactly known for watertight safety regulations either.
The
app
is now owned by the Russian
Internet company
Mail.ru and has made negative headlines over and over again in recent years.
WhatsApp postpones data protection change
WhatsApp
has
reacted
to the falling
number of users
and
postponed
its
data protection change
.
This should now only be carried out about three months later, as the
company announced
.
If you don't live in the European Union, you have until May 15th to approve the change.
* tz.de is part of the nationwide Ippen digital editorial network.
