It's one of those typical double-edged swords of social network services:
On the one hand, giving your real phone number to WhatsApp is what allows
your friends (who have that phone number of yours stored in their phone) to
trust that it's really you, and this is one of the main key features that
makes WhatsApp such a big success among its users.
On the other hand, the fact that they have everybody's real phone number is
also a big reason behind the ridiculously high valuation of the company.
They could have easily chosen a business model where they don't use your
phone number for any other purpose than for brokering trust between users.
This was especially true when WhatsApp was still a paid service after one
year of free use (I think they now no longer charge money, not even after
the first year).
The formulation does however seem to focus on "we may contact you", and
binds them to draw a line between "customer services" and "marketing",
which seems totally fine to me, so there I agree with Hugo.
But if you read this another way, they only give examples of what they
might use your phone number for, they don't explicitly restrict what
they'll do with it, so they may also use it to track you.
So I would read this is "You have to provide your real identity, and there
is no clear guarantee that this will only be used for billing purposes and
user-to-user trust". But then again, similar services probably also don't
give such a guarantee. So all in all, let's classify this as the following
case:
{ name: 'pseudonym not allowed (user-to-user trust is relevant for
service)', point: 'neutral', score: 10 }
from the 'track' topic
(see
https://github.com/tosdr/tosdr-build/blob/8bd1ec1f818f31ed77be9df6b5455decab8f6b01/scripts/cases.js#L135
)
On Friday, August 31, 2012 at 10:36:28 AM UTC+2, Sebastián Waisbrot wrote:
>
> On 8/28/12 2:41 PM, Hugo Roy wrote:
> > Le jeudi 23 ao�t 2012 � 09:59 -0700, Sebasti�n Waisbrot a �crit :
> >> http://www.whatsapp.com/legal/
> >>
> >>> We may, however, use your mobile phone number (or email address, if
> >>> provided) without further consent for non-marketing or administrative
> >>> purposes (such as notifying you of major WhatsApp Site or WhatsApp
> Service
> >>> changes or for customer service purposes).
> >>
> > Does it deserve a point in your opinion?
> Most mobile app don't collect your phone number to send you any
> information. WhatsApp requires your phone number to work, because it is
> its core, but they also reserve the right to use it for texting stuff
> like major changes (which IMHO is a marketing purpose).
>
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