Jigsaw Security has been watching closely the situation in the EU concerning users private data. Naked Security has confirmed our suspicions in a blog post today concerning the sharing of Whatsapp users phone and personal data with parent company Facebook.
We have been monitoring this situation closely because many TOS documents allow this type of sharing and information brokers have been using this type of data to track individuals even when data has been sent in an anonymous format.
Currently most of this data is delayed 48 hours but then shows up in various platforms whereas user privacy concerns begin to surface. When combined with other data such as public postings, known attributes such as addresses a subject may visit, it becomes easy to determine who a particular individual is in the anonymous data and then to figure out where that person has used the applications in the past.
According to Naked Security by Sophos various EU based entities are telling Whatsapp to stop sharing user data with Facebook. This will have far reaching consequences for data providers and those aggregating this data to perform locate services.