Those cases, which allege that Facebook bought WhatsApp to prevent it from growing into a rival that would siphon off its users, are seeking to force Facebook to spin off WhatsApp and Instagram. early in the pandemic, coupled with it being tangled in antitrust suits and probes around the world, has drawn a new level of scrutiny to the way data on its more than two billion users is shared across the Facebook ecosystem.įacebook’s 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp is now a main focus of antitrust suits by the FTC and attorneys general from nearly every state. But the messaging app’s growth in the U.S. WhatsApp and Facebook have long exchanged valuable metadata - “data about the data,” as Trahan put it - which offers insight into consumers’ behavior and is extremely important for advertisers. Lawmakers’ prolonged impasse on a national privacy law has left the door open for the most influential players in the tech world - including Facebook, Apple and Google - to self-regulate and write their own playbooks for how data can be shared across companies and around the world. Technology companies are growing and innovating faster than laws and leaders in Washington can move, and it’s unclear how the new administration and Congress will catch up. The conflict highlights the mounting struggle on the part of Congress to check the power of tech companies, even when lawmakers’ constituents are up in arms. “Facebook should uphold their promise, and that of WhatsApp’s founders, to prioritize the privacy of their users.” Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), who has led a push by some House Democrats to force Facebook to reverse course, said in an interview. “We can’t keep letting the largest companies in the world, founded in the United States, break their promises,” Rep.
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