European privacy regulators have fired a warning shot to Facebookâ(TM)s WhatsApp and Yahoo, saying they sent letters to the companies expressing concerns about possible violations of the bloc’s data-protection rules. From a TechCrunch report: A seismic shift in privacy policy by messaging app WhatsApp this summer, when it said it would begin sharing user data with parent company Facebook including for ad targeting, has now attracted the attention of European’s data protection watchdog group, the Article 29 Working Party. The WP29 group wrote to WhatsApp founder Jan Koum yesterday, setting out its concerns about the privacy policy U-turn — including how the shift was communicated to users. “The Article 29 Working Party (WP29) has serious concerns regarding the manner in which the information relating to the updated Terms of Service and Privacy Policy was provided to users and consequently about the validity of the users’ consent,”it writes. “WP29 also questions the effectiveness of control mechanisms offered to users to exercise their rights and the effects that the data sharing will have on people that are not a user of any other service within the Facebook family of companies.”

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Source: Slashdot – WhatsApp-Facebook Privacy U-Turn Now Being Probed by EU Data Watchdog