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Photo: Nick Ansell / dpa
All WhatsApp users in Europe will see a new banner when they open the app in the coming days.
The subsidiary of Meta (former name: Facebook) is trying to make its data protection regulations more transparent and understandable.
Three things are particularly important to WhatsApp because it absolutely wants to avoid making the headlines again after the communication disaster at the beginning of the year regarding the new terms of use and data protection guidelines announced at the time:
Nobody has to actively agree to the future regulations in order to continue using WhatsApp.
The handling of user data and the functionality of WhatsApp will not change at all.
All chats remain end-to-end encrypted and therefore unreadable for everyone except the respective senders and recipients.
The change in regulations is in response to a fine by the WhatsApp regulator, the Data Protection Commission (DPC) in Ireland.
DPC fined WhatsApp € 225 million in September because the company had insufficiently informed its users about the use of their data.
WhatsApp is taking legal action against this decision, but the legal battle could last for years.
Now users should - and must - at least be better informed about what happens to their data.
35 pages on data protection
"We are updating our privacy policy for people in Europe" will be - translated - on the banner, and it will be "at the direction" of the Irish authorities.
(SPIEGEL only received the English versions of the banner and the new guidelines by Sunday.)
In the coming days, the banner will be visible to every user, in this country in German, and link to the reformulated document.
This, in turn, differs from the version that was valid up to then mainly in one point: It is much longer.
The old English version had just under 7,000 words, the new one more than 11,000.
It has 35 pages in PDF format.
In the German version this is likely to be similar.
If you want to compare for yourself: WhatsApp links all previous versions on this page.
At second glance, it is noticeable that WhatsApp now works with color-coded text blocks at the beginning of the various sections as well as tables in order to make the new guideline at least clearer.
A WhatsApp spokesman announced that the content had been "reorganized and more details added," but nothing would change in the way the app works and, for example, what data WhatsApp shares with Meta.
According to WhatsApp, the additional details mainly concern three areas:
What data the company stores and why, when it is deleted and how WhatsApp works with third-party providers,
Why WhatsApp "shares user data across national borders" and how it is protected in the process
and what legal bases WhatsApp is referring to.
An example for the first point is a paragraph that has not yet been included about which data is not encrypted and therefore visible to WhatsApp itself, including the profile picture and names and descriptions of groups.
The section on the legal basis for data processing in the USA or other non-European countries, on the other hand, has merely been reformulated a little.
How many text passages have been changed in total and whether this will make them more understandable for each user is difficult to say due to the new sorting and formatting of many sections.
It is therefore also unclear for the time being whether the Irish data protection authority will be satisfied with this.