Facebook is now changing their mind, and moving away from their previous intent of selling ads inside of WhatsApp. According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook had been working on building ads in WhatsApp but the team has now been disbanded in recent months. Their work was also “deleted from WhatsApp’s code.”
The Wall Street Journal then goes on to say that Facebook still aims to integrated ads into WhatsApp’s Status feature, but will remain ad free for the time being. Ultimately, this is all a bunch of bullshit on Facebook’s part to monetize each and every aspects of our everyday lives. Considering they did acquire WhatsApp for $22 billion in 2014, they’re looking for ways to monetize the popular messaging service, but this ain’t it.
This setback has now made turned Facebook’s focus to WhatsApp features that will “allow businesses to communicate with customers and organize those contacts. But founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton were apparently concerned that a commercial messaging feature would make WhatsApp weaken its end-to-end encryption. The co-founders have already left the company, precisely over privacy concerns and clashes similar to this one.
But clearly, the plan really isn’t working for the Zucc right now. Considering they want to bring ads to ane=rypted service, it was never going to be easy. But I for one, am not keen on the news that they’re looking for ways to push their ads and use our own data against us even in WhatsApp. Ever noticed that something you searched for online, suddenly an ad pops up for it in Facebook or Instagram? Well yeah. Kinda invasive huh?
Now imagine a similar feature being implemented in WhatsApp. We still don’t know how exactly the feature will work, so right now it’s all speculation. But considering they wanted to implement ads into the status feature of WhatsApp, would something you typed out in a chat be able to be used against you? Would an ad for that product you typed, suddenly pop up in the status section of WhatsApp? It’s cloudy and vague so we don’t know exact details, but we can be assured at the very least, that it’s a good thing they stopped working on this.
