Two days after whatsApp’s new privacy policy that allows data to be exchanged with Facebook users began to govern, the Ministry of Internal Commerce formalized the precautionary measure issued to The Argentine subsidiary of Facebook to suspend the implementation of the new Terms of Service and Privacy Policies of the instant messaging application, considering that “a situation of abuse of a dominant position would be incurred”. The decision of the Secretariat leading Paula Español was taken on the basis of the opinion of the National Competition Commission (CNDC), which considered that “whatsApp’s new Privacy Policies could harm competition and the general economic interest, thus violating the Competition Act, more precisely a violation of Article 1 of Law 27.442”. Resolution 492/2021, published today in the Official Gazette, indicated that the suspension was determined for 180 days or until the completion of the open investigation. That is, for the duration of the precautionary, the CNDC will investigate facebook’s use of data obtained from WhatsApp users and presumed to be usable for commercial purposes.Internal Trade stated that the courier company has penetration exceeding 76% of mobile phones in the country. The other messaging applications still have low penetration, so the user cannot replace it without losing this means of communication with many of their contacts.
“This creates strong asymmetry in the bargaining power between the user and WhatsApp, so they will be mostly forced to accept the new Terms of Service, therefore enabling WhatsApp to collect excessive personal data and share personal information improperly with other applications in the group, such as Facebook and Instagram,” the resolution explained.
Data includes: access to the address book, phone number, transaction data (for example, if Facebook Pay or WhatsApp Stores are used), service-related information, business interaction information when using the service, mobile device information, and IP address. In this context, the National Directorate for the Protection of Personal Data of the Agency for access to Public Information of the National Government initiated an ex officio investigation into the application with the aim of assorticing whether these updates are in compliance with Law 25.326 on the Protection of Personal Data, Regulatory Decree 1558/01 and Law 27.483 approving the Convention for the Protection of Persons with regard to the Automated Processing of Personal Data of the Council of Europe. If you do not agree to the new Terms of Service on May 15, you will initially experience limitations in the functionality of the application, and after a few weeks the application will stop operating and lose all stored data. For their part, as set out in the CNDC, Facebook and Instagram report, with the power that this information will give them, in addition to the latest information processing technologies, “they will be able to strengthen their dominance in other markets such as online advertising, raising barriers to entry or making it difficult to survive their non-integrated competitors and ultimately monopolizing the market to the detriment of the general economic interest.” Also, even though WhatsApp’s messaging service seems free, it’s not. The information that the user provides is extremely valuable to social networks, so much so that this free subscription could be an unfair and even ruinous agreement for the user,” the Secretariat stressed.
