News

WhatsApp Decides Not To Limit Users Who Don’t Accept Its New Privacy Policy

It seems that the backlash has been strong enough to make executives at Facebook reconsider their decisions because the latest announcement from the company contradicts the previous one.

Published

5 years ago

June 4, 2021

Joanna Melki

whatsapp decides not to limit users who don't accept its new privacy policy

This year in February, Facebook-owned WhatsApp stated in an FAQ on its website that users who didn’t accept its new privacy policy by May 15^th would lose access to certain features, such as the ability to send or read messages from the app.

The announcement sparked a wave of protests on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, with some users threatening to leave the messaging and voice-over-IP service app for more privacy-oriented alternatives, such as Signal, Telegram, or Threema.

It seems that the backlash has been strong enough to make executives at Facebook reconsider their decisions because the latest announcement from the company contradicts the previous one.

“Given recent discussions with various authorities and privacy experts, we want to make clear that we will not limit the functionality of how WhatsApp works for those who have not yet accepted the update,” said a WhatsApp spokesperson in a statement to The Verge.

WhatsApp

One reason why the new policy caused so much outrage was that many WhatsApp users believed that they would be required to share their phone numbers and other sensitive information with various third parties.

In reality, the policy update affects mainly businesses using the platform to sell their goods and services using the messaging app, allowing them to see what you’re saying and use this information for their own marketing purposes.

“We will continue to remind users from time to time and let them accept the update, including when they choose to use relevant optional features like communicating with a business that is receiving support from Facebook,” the WhatsApp spokesperson added.

The entire rollout of the policy update has been mishandled, to say the least, with WhatsApp seemingly not fully realizing how much more security and privacy-oriented have its users become since the messaging app started sharing user data with Facebook in 2016.

News

Instagram Now Lets You Tune Its Algorithm, But There’s One Big Catch

The new controls promise users “agency” over their feed, but asking to see more from accounts you actually follow returns an error.

Published

3 days ago

June 11, 2026

Nour Nasir

Instagram

Instagram has expanded its algorithm personalization feature to the main feed, letting users specify which topics they want surfaced more or less often in recommendations.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri framed the change as a matter of user control. “I believe it’s in our best interest as a business to empower people to shape Instagram into something that works for them, and that people should be able to have a meaningful amount of agency over the products they spend so much time in,” he wrote on Threads.

Though it turns out that agency has limits. The controls only accept interest-based topics, such as “rescue dogs” or “parenting humor”. Requesting “posts from people I follow” returns no results, which is obviously a sore point for creators whose posts rarely reach their own audiences. Mosseri conceded the tension: “Who you follow used to be a meaningful tool people had for shaping their own experience, and as recommendations took over the main feed that tool quietly stopped working”.

Also Read: How To Find & Cancel Pending Instagram Requests

Instagram credits large language models for making its algorithms legible enough to personalize, and says it is “actively working on supporting requests for people, different moods or vibes, content types, and more” – potentially leading to a fully “bespoke” version of the app.