WhatsApp Will Share Your Phone Number With Facebook. How To Stop.?

The messaging service WhatsApp is changing its privacy policy for the first time since being bought by Facebook in 2014. The app will begin sharing some of its data and phone numbers with the social network. It will also start testing how businesses, too, can talk to its users, for instance by offering flight or shipping or banking notifications.

It has been almost two years since Facebook acquired WhatsApp for a whopping $19 billion. WhatsApp’s CEO, Jan Koum have said “nothing would change” while talking about privacy policy and handling precious user data.

However, its seems that privacy policies have been changed over time. WhatsApp announced on Thursday that it would start sharing user data with Facebook. Facebook and WhatsApp said that the new policy will help “improve your Facebook ads and products experience” which will also give business a new avenue to reach potential customers.

According to the the Terms and Privacy Policy, WhatApp will share the following pieces of information with Facebook and its “family” of companies (i.e. Instagram, Oculus):

• Phone Number
• Type of operating system
• How often people open the app
• Screen resolution
• Mobile carrier
• A device identifier
• Mobile country code

How to Stop Sharing

You can choose not to share your account information with Facebook for targeting purposes. There are two ways to do this:

1. On WhatsApp, don’t click Agree when it asks you to confirm you are happy with the change of terms. Instead, click to read more. You should then see a check box or control button at the bottom of the screen which says “Share my WhatsApp account information with Facebook to improve my Facebook ads and product experiences…”. Uncheck this.

2. If you have already agreed to the updated terms, you can go to to Settings > Account > Share my account info in the app. Then uncheck the box or toggle the control. But quick, WhatsApp says you only have 30 days to make this choice after agreeing to the new terms.

So, this is how you can stop WhatsApp from sharing your phone number with Facebook. You have 30 Days to opt out for this settings.

But you can’t safeguard all your data. No matter what settings you select, Facebook and its subsidiaries will still use your information to improve infrastructure and delivery systems, count unique users and fight spam. Facebook-owned apps keep tabs on copyright infringement and spam across platforms—if a spammer is flagged on Instagram, for instance, their WhatsApp account can also be suspended.