WhatsApp made a decision: it won’t limit your account anymore

There have been many discussions around WhatsApp’s policies. The first time they wanted to change their privacy conditions, they said if users didn’t accept it, they would cancel their accounts. This made many users concerned and millions went on social media to complain about this measure. The company thought about it, and then said that they wouldn’t cancel the account, but just progressively limit it. This second measure made people take the decision to leave the app.

In consideration with a massive drop out of the app due to these new measures, the company has to think it through another time, and now recently declared that they will not limit any account if the user didn’t accept the conditions. This has been the result of many weeks of discussions and debate, but it seems that the final straw for the company was realizing that people preferred jump to other platforms instead of accepting any terms.

The long journey of WhatsApp’s privacy policies

If you don’t know much about this whole issue, let us give you the short story. Months ago, the company released changes on its privacy conditions. In these ones, they declared that some information from WhatsApp was going to be shared with Facebook in order to improve certain features of the app. If the users didn’t accept the conditions, their account was going to be deleted. People were really concerned with their privacy, so there was a massive drop out of the app, and other platforms like Telegram or Signal gained thousands of users.

Due to this, they decided to rethink the policies, so they held back and waited. This month, they released, again, a new set of conditions. In these ones, they stated that if the user didn’t accept the conditions of sharing data, their account was going to be limited. So the user wouldn’t be able to see their friend’s stories status, see their contact list, or even see the notifications. Of course, these limitations could be solved if the user accepted the conditions.

These new rules had the same result, there was another massive drop out of the app and people went to other platforms. Seeing this, and seeing that people were really not happy with the decisions, they decided to release another statement saying that they were not limiting any account if they didn’t accept the conditions, and the user would only see the notification to accept them every so often.

This whole journey could’ve been avoided if the company didn’t release harsh restrictions, as some experts commented. However, now with this new decision, it seems that they are hoping to retain some users or maybe even bring others back. The question is, will people accept these new terms? Or is the decision of using other apps permanent? The other platforms are open, without ads, encrypted and have many features that WhatsApp will never have. Only time can let us know people’s reaction to these new terms.