Accepting that it had led to “confusion” and spawned an abundance of “misinformation”, messaging accommodation WhatsApp Saturday promulgated it will be delaying the implementation of its incipient privacy policy until May 15. This, the Facebook product hopes, will give users more time to “review the policy at their own pace”.

Why has WhatsApp delayed the implementation of the New privacy policy?

Ever since it promulgated the incipient policy in early January, there was mystification over whether this denotes parent company Facebook, which has been facing some trust deficit ecumenically, will get to access utilizer messages. As this discombobulation, partly caused by a hard-to-understand privacy policy which opted to not spell out how the vicissitudes will play out on ground, gained ground, millions of users across the world opted to visually examine options, even as WhatsApp gave users the option to accept or leave the accommodation.
What transpires now?

Nothing authentically vicissitudes in the privacy policy, which WhatsApp later elucidated does not transmute anything when it comes to personal messaging and only impacts some incipient messaging with businesses. However, now users have till May 15 to read through, internalise and accept the incipient policy and its changes. Earlier, the deadline was February 8, which had integrated to the panic among users and fears that something drastic is on the anvil.
WhatsApp has additionally reiterated in the incipient post that users have nothing to be apprehensive about. “WhatsApp was built on a simple conception: what you apportion with your friends and family stays between you. This betokens we will always forfend your personal conversations with end-to-end encryption, so that neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can visually perceive these private messages. Which is why we don’t keep logs of who everyone’s messaging or calling. We additionally can’t optically discern your shared location and we don’t share your contacts with Facebook,” it verbalizes.

Both Signal and Telegram have benefited from this exodus, so much so that both accommodations seem to be struggling to handle the influx of incipient users — Signal accommodations were disrupted on Friday. What could come to WhatsApp’s advantage in the long run is the network effect, which will gradually sink in as users realise that those who they optate to chat with have not moved along with them to the same alternative option. And this could be what WhatsApp might be hoping from with the delayed adoption of the privacy policy.

DISCLAIMER: The author is solely responsible for the views expressed in this article. The author carries the responsibility for citing and/or licensing of images utilized within the text.