WhatsApp With All Of The Controversy Around Privacy?

Do customers actually care about privacy enough for companies to pay attention? In recent years, the verdict seems to be a resounding “no.” That could be changing, though.

Here’s what I said a little while back: Facebook is willing to sell your data to the highest bidder. But 2.7 billion people use it. Most have figured out by now that since it’s free, they (and their data) are the product. Facebook is hardly alone.

So, when I think about how companies can get a business advantage, privacy just didn’t seem to be a big winner. Maybe that’s changing.

First, let’s look at What’sApp’s recent PR disaster.

It changed its terms of service and millions of people who didn’t actually read about the changes were under the impression that WhatsApp was about to start reading chats, listening to calls and passing on all of your contacts info to Facebook (which owns WhatsApp).

Apparently, the TOS changes for non-business users don’t actually do the things people are complaining about -- but the rumors were enough for millions of users to make the switch to competitors like Signal and Telegram.

Getting customers to complain about your product is easy. Making customers so angry that they actually switch services, with all the inconvenience that entails? That’s hard.

So apparently, people care (or at least claim to care) about privacy now.

Here’s another data point that seems to show this: the case of Google users supposedly flocking to Duck Duck Go, over privacy concerns. DuckDuckGo’s search engine, which does not track user searches or share personal data with third-party companies, increased its traffic by 62 percent in 2020. That’s a tiny fraction of Google searches, but it’s not nothing.

And then we have Flo, an app used by 100 million-plus people. It shared women’s period and fertility information with 3rd-party services and saw a swarm of negative news coverage, while it got punished by the FTC.

It may be that some customers are actually starting to care about privacy. Either that, or they think it’s cool to say that they do.

This may be a sign that companies can differentiate themselves by giving customers a genuine opt-in option. Let’s say a company gives them an option, perhaps the paid version of the service, to not collect and share data and they make good on that promise, that could be a competitive advantage.

Meanwhile, If customers don’t want to pay to use an app, fine -- they will get what they’re not paying for.

And that’s the recurrent pattern.