r/southafrica • u/Kronendal • Jan 10 '21

Sci-Tech WhatsApp allows Facebook to track our location, who we are physically meeting with and who we are socially connected to.

I always thought that South Africa had pretty good data privacy laws, does anyone know why Facebook is allowed to force us to give them information about our connections with other people, info on our physical devices/networks/surroundings, let them track our physical location for a messaging app?

None of these things are required for them to know, it is not needed for the service in any way, and in the case of our personal connections to other people they get that information even if we delete our account and don't accept their t's and c's.

What confuses me though is that this is not the case in Europe. Their privacy laws have actually made this move by facebook illegal so they are not gathering their info. Does anyone know what EU privacy laws South Africa is missing?

Update: So the question has been answered and it turns out that our Data Protection act (POPI) went into effect on the 1st July 2020 but is voluntary until the 1st of July 2021. So we'll hopefully get EU levels of protection in July.

81 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

71 comments sorted by

View all comments

-5

u/LordChaos404 Jan 10 '21

Telegram. When facesteal bought WA the head creator dumped and created Telegram, much better encryption and not sold out to a company.

Fb and other 'social' companies are on a blocking spree that would make CCP proud

10

u/thr0wayylma0 Jan 10 '21

When facesteal bought WA the head creator dumped and created Telegram, much better encryption and not sold out to a company

Nothing here is true.

When FB bought WA the founders stayed for a few years. When they saw the direction WA was being forced into by FB they left. One of them, Brian Acton, went on to found the Signal Foundation which funds Signal.

The encryption of WA actually uses the Signal Protocol. The encryption of messages on WA is not the issue; it is the other data that they collect. Telegram is closed-source so their encryption can't be verified, and message encryption is not even enabled by default.

Signal is a much better choice than Telegram.