Terms and conditions are subject to change. The recent change in WhatsApp's policies has sparked of a discussion, especially given that it possibly has over 100 million users in India, and is a key tool for both personal and political communication, despite not having an open API. A few points for your consideration: 1. Products and businesses have to adapt to the rapidly changing and ever-changing business and regulatory environment that is the Internet, and a part of the evolution of businesses is changes in their policy. Lets not forget that the Internet is a space of hyper-competition where businesses have to keep evolving in order to remain relevant and quite often have to force change on consumers to stay ahead of competition. Facebook has a history of doing this, especially with its own privacy policy. Given WhatsApp's promise of no advertising and no sharing of data, this feels like betrayal, and should be highlighted, but it really shouldn't surprise us. 2. As someone mentioned, Data is the new oil. In a networked world, where phone numbers are identifiers, as are IMEI numbers, there is the opportunity to track users, usage, and identify multiple data points. These can be used to provide better services, but there's also the challenge that if we were to not provide the data that is demanded, the service would not be provided to us. We are trading our privacy for services. To some extent, it is in our hands. We can choose to use other services.…
