Yesterday WhatsApp took a leap that can become dangerous since there are many users who do not want their phone number to be used for commercial purposes. It is not an attack on privacy or anything, but we already know how Facebook brings them with the information it has, so open the door a little, in the future, it may always be that way.
The idea of Facebook and WhatsApp is that companies can contact you directly through the messaging app. In any case, we can close that door if we want to in a very simple way and that I will explain in a few steps below. There is a very quick one and it is when you first read the change in the WhatsApp policy, scroll, press more and you can deactivate the option to share your data.
How to stop sharing your WhatsApp data with Facebook
This second method is the one that you can use at any time to activate or deactivate the option to share your account data with Facebook. So if you ignored that screen that alerts the user about recent changes in WhatsApp, these are the steps to follow:
- Go to Settings
- Click on Account
- Here you will see a checkbox next to “Share account information”
- Uncheck this box to be outside the new guidelines imposed by WhatsApp and Facebook
WhatsApp is playing it a bit since we are about to receive a new messaging app called Allo, from Google, which will be linked to the phone number and that could spread like wildfire, as has happened with Pokémon Go or Google Photos.
If we were facing a Facebook that has always been very clear, surely we would not hesitate so much, but sometimes it has gone through the shadows to perform certain actions, so we remain cautious.
[Updated] By deactivating the option you will have no way to activate it again. We do not know why, but it has more to do with the fact that we have 30 days to notify WhatsApp that we do not want our information to be shared