A Chat Over WhatsApp

 It's an unusual topic of discussion....Germans, WhatsApp, and privacy.

What is WhatsApp?  It's a simple application you can download to your Tab or smart-phone....where you can text people (freely).  You can take photos and swap them.  You can send your location on a little map to your friend. 

For the record....at least around the end of 2020....58-million Germans use WhatsApp on a daily basis (remember it's 83-million for total population).  I would generally assess another 5-million Germans on top of that....occasionally use WhatsApp.

WhatsApp originally developed as a stand-alone App.  Couple of years ago....Facebook bought them (22-billion is the quoted end-price).  This was in 2014.

So at the time....to reassure everyone....Facebook absolutely promised (worldwide) that none of WhatsApp data would become Facebook data (and sold).  

In the past month, that promise got dumped.  

Reason?  You can twist it around forty different ways, but Facebook probably has looked at the 22-billion dollars spent, and really needs more 'pay-back' to occur.  

Reaction in Germany?  It's pretty harsh.  Focus wrote up a piece today, and squares away the facts.  It's worth a read.

WhatsApp is going to put up a consent page, and you basically have no choice....either you agree to give them the data, or they dump your service.   They figure you won't do anything but agree, and then they sell the data to fill the profit necessity.

German reaction?  As Focus put it....they looked around and found three options (Threema, Telegram, and Signal).  All do the basic stuff that WhatsApp did.  In the case of Signal, you can encrypt the heck out of the message, and they promise not to use your data.  

My suspicion with all three alternates?  Well....I think half of WhatsApp German users will vacate the service within sixty days, and create a serious problem for Facebook.  They can resort to buying out the three (figure a minimum of 40-billion dollars).....which I doubt that this makes great business sense.

This morning, I loaded Signal up and checked out the features.  Simple enough.  Does 70-percent of what WhatsApp did (doesn't appear to do the map feature).  Will it still be free in a year?  That's my serious skeptical view....I think it'll eventually flip to some 15-Euro a year fee....to stay free of Facebook and the advertiser crowd.  Personally....if one single account was 15-Euro a year (on both my Tab and Cellphone)....I wouldn't care.  

So this whole discussion is about privacy of data?  Yeah.  

Germans over the past five years have taken this as a five-star situation.  They want their privacy.  I suspect if you took this up with a group of twenty Germans (at least adults)....the bulk of them (75-percent) would argue that their data....is their data.  They don't want to share.  Kids might be the exception and have no position on the debate.

If Europeans go in masses to dump WhatsApp....what happens to Facebook's profit margin?  Well, it's simply not worth as much on the stock price (211.85 Euro per share today).  I'm not suggesting a serious drop.....but you might wake up in March and Facebook kicking the can a good bit because they lost 10-percent of their world audience, and stock might have tanked 5-to-7 percent because of this trend.