The messaging service that once published a blog post titled “Why we don’t sell ads,” is getting into the ad game—albeit indirectly.
Banner ads won’t start showing up within the app, but the company has updated its terms of service to reflect that it will be sharing user data with parent company Facebook to help it “improve your Facebook ads and products experiences.”
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The announcement came in a blog post on the site published on Aug. 25. In it, WhatsApp explained:
But by coordinating more with Facebook, we'll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp. And by connecting your phone number with Facebook's systems, Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them. For example, you might see an ad from a company you already work with, rather than one from someone you've never heard of.
This is a significant about-face for WhatsApp, which Facebook acquired in 2014 for a whopping $22 billion.
In the company’s 2012 blog post, WhatsApp founder Jan Koun assured users that the company wouldn’t harvest their data. He wrote:
These days companies know literally everything about you, your friends, your interests, and they use it all to sell ads.
Though WhatsApp insists that third-party ads won’t make their way into the platform, the move makes it easy to see how the company could change its stance on this as well.
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