Eleven years after purchasing WhatsApp, Meta is going full throttle with its plans to monetize the communication platform. And while officials at the social media giant say that users’ privacy will still be protected, some experts are urging caution.
Meta announced on Monday that over the next few months it will bring advertisements to WhatsApp, a radical shift for an app whose founders deliberately chose not to include advertising (or games or anything else that was popular among app makers at the time). The ads will appear in just one segment of the app called Updates, which is used by about 1.5 billion people per day, or roughly half of the app’s total monthly users. Ads will not be a part of WhatsApp’s chat feature with friends.
Meta said it will collect some data from users to help with targeting the ads. This includes location and language. The company said it will not collect any information from messages or calls.
“Like everything else on WhatsApp, we’ve built these features in the most privacy-oriented way possible,” the company wrote in the Monday blog post. “Your personal messages, calls, and statuses remain end-to-end encrypted, meaning no one can see or hear them. That includes Meta.”
But the revamped ad policy raises some red flags, especially given Meta’s spotty historical record when it comes to privacy.
“The fact that Meta has promised that it’s adding ads to WhatsApp with privacy in mind does not make me trust this new feature,” says Lena Cohen, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “Ads that are targeted based on your personal data are a privacy nightmare, no matter what app they’re on.”
Concerns about WhatsApp’s privacy practices aren’t new. Just over a year ago, Elon Musk criticized the platform, writing on X that it “exports your user data every night.” (Meta’s Will Cathcart, who runs WhatsApp, denied this in a post on X. “Many have said this already, but it’s worth repeating: This is not correct,” Cathcart wrote. “We take security seriously, and that’s why we end-to-end encrypt your messages. They don’t get sent to us every night or exported to us.”)
Meanwhile, Meta continues to face broader scrutiny over its handling of personal information, including a pending lawsuit stemming from the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal and a recent $1.4 billion settlement over its unauthorized collection of biometric information.
WhatsApp’s cofounders Jan Koum and Brian Acton have never been shy to express their distaste for the advertising industry. That caused strife after WhatsApp was bought by Meta, and in 2018, the two founders left the company, using an escape hatch in their contracts after a reported series of clashes with executives. (Doing so cost Acton $900 million and Koum $400 million, as they departed before they were eligible for stock rewards.)
Acton, at the time, expressed regrets for selling the app, saying “At the end of the day, I sold my company. I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. I live with that every day.”
Meta, though, has pledged not to put ads within WhatsApp chats. In November 2023, Cathcart said Meta “won’t put ads in your inbox,” a vow he has been able to keep, in large part because of the popularity of the Updates tab.
Perhaps anticipating the concerns that Monday’s announcement might stir up, Meta launched an ad campaign three weeks ago that reinforced the privacy of personal messages. While there are no estimates about how much Meta will be able to grow its ad revenue with WhatsApp advertisements, it’s a number that’s likely to increase in coming years. (In 2024, for perspective, Meta’s ad revenue reached $162.4 billion company-wide.)
Despite that, EFF’s Cohen says users who are concerned about the privacy implications of this move are right to be on their guard. While she said the promises the company made in announcing the addition of ads were encouraging, they weren’t sufficient to completely ensure that user data would remain confidential.
Cohen warns that even though Meta claims it won’t use personally identifiable data, the information it does collect can still be used to reidentify users—especially when combined from other data combed from the web. “I would definitely recommend that people do not add WhatsApp to their Meta account center,” she says. “That will allow Meta to broadcast even more of your personal information to potential advertisers. And that data wouldn’t just include info that Meta gets from you on its own platforms; it would include information it gets from tracking you across the web.”
The final deadline for Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech Awards is Friday, June 20, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
