I dunno, I've personally heard from friends who thought that WhatsApp was turning off encryption. Tons of people have misunderstood what the policy change meant. I agree that it's partly self-serving to focus on those people (as opposed to the people who did understand the policy and still felt angry about it), but it's not unreasonable.

Agreed, I had to explain to my friends (some even lawyers, who felt very strongly about this) what this change actually entailed regarding message encryption.

Care to share your explanation. What does it mean? Genuinely curious.

It's true though? The actualy privacy policy changes were just about enabling business messaging and didn't functionally change anything wrt what user data is collected or shared with Facebook.

Wasn't this just the case in the EU? My understanding is in the US they did explicitly have another section about data sharing in the US giving a three point update compared to the two point update we got.

The third bullet point was that the updates includes changes to "How we partner with Facebook to offer integrations across the Facebook Company Products".

The new privacy policy just reformatted how data is shared with facebook from the "Affiliated Companies" section to a new section "How We Work With Other Facebook Companies", but the only real change is, like the bullet point says, an added sentence about how data might be shared to integrate whatsapp into other facebook products, and it's clearly "integrate" in the functional sense.

Similar to facebook messenger recently adding instagram messaging, they're probably planning to add whastapp messenging too. I imagine this change isn't in the EU privacy policy just because just like the integram change, more product integration there is held up by antitrust action.

Notably, facebook using whatsapp data for ad targeting has been allowed by the privacy policy since 2016

Talking about tone deaf...that blog granted with a cookie popup, regardless of firefox tracking protection, a plethora ublock plugins, AND the "I don't care about cookies" FF plugin (I have Forget Me Not in the background)

You say “tone deaf”.

I say “manipulative and evil”.

The customer/product is always wrong!