Last week, Meta announced that WhatsApp will now feature targeted ads. As many news articles and comments from civil society have pointed out, the founders never wanted advertising in Whatsapp. There has been a lot of concern about this move from privacy advocates. Here’s what the move really means for your privacy.
Ads will not show up in the chat window, but will be shown in the “Updates” tab, which would previously have featured status updates from contacts, and updates from Channels. The announcement says ads will be based on “info like your country or city, language, the Channels you’re following, and how you interact with the ads you see.” A WhatsApp spokesperson also mentioned to the press that device information will be used. This is only one of many changes to WhatsApp’s privacy.
In April 2025, Meta expanded the Meta AI chatbot to WhatsApp (it started its rollout in the US in 2023), to much outcry about potential impacts on privacy. Just yesterday, Meta announced that users in the US will be able to summarize the contents of chats with AI—supposedly without Meta retaining any information. And back in 2016, WhatsApp changed its terms of service to share metadata with Meta companies. This change had real impacts. For example, it allowed “Facebook to suggest WhatsApp contacts as Facebook friends,”— not something people who use WhatsApp for work may necessarily want.
WhatsApps’ claim to total privacy is rooted in its use of end to end encryption. Encryption is the process of mathematically scrambling data so that it can only be read by a recipient with the key to unscramble it. End to end encryption for messaging means messages are encrypted—made unreadable—on your device and then decrypted—made readable again—on the recipient’s device. This protects the contents of your message from being read by your phone service provider, Meta, or other third parties. WhatsApp was built on an incredibly solid foundation of encryption created by Signal.
Signal is an encrypted messaging app run by a non-profit that makes the code underlying the app open source, meaning they publish it online. It can be reviewed by third parties for weaknesses. In this sense, Signal has always been the more secure app. Despite this, WhatsApp has been a favorite tool of activists for many years. The app is used by everyone, from grandparents to teens, especially in the Global Majority. WhatsApp can sometimes even be accessed free with mobile phone plans. Unfortunately, the time has come to start taking stock of whether WhatsApp can really be considered private anymore, and how to convince friends and family to move to Signal.
Meta’s chatbot is particularly concerning. The chatbot shows up in WhatsApp contacts, and can be interacted with in a group chat as well by mentioning “@Meta AI.” It can’t be entirely removed, though it can be partially disabled in WhatsApp settings. What’s important to know about the chatbot is that any messages sent to it are unencrypted—meaning they are not protected by end to end encryption and can be read by Meta and other parties.
According to Meta, “Only messages that mention @Meta AI, or that people choose to share with Meta AI, can be read by Meta. Meta can’t read any other messages in your personal chats.” This conveniently doesn’t point out that anyone in a group chat could potentially CHOOSE to share messages with Meta AI, meaning that anyone could put the privacy of a group at risk. And aside from any of these issues, the chatbot has already made serious errors, such as sharing a private individual’s phone number in response to a WhatsApp query asking for a customer service number. Understanding the implications of both the introduction of ads and the Meta AI chatbot will help.
Fortunately, there was so much outcry over this feature that less than a month after it expanded across markets, Meta introduced a new feature called “Advanced Chat Privacy,” which “can block others from exporting chats, auto-downloading media to their phone, and using messages for AI features.”
Turn this feature on now.
Meta’s announcement includes instructions and screenshots. And keep in mind, as Wired pointed out, “like disappearing messages, anyone in a chat can turn Advanced Chat Privacy on and off—which is recorded for all to see—so participants just need to be mindful of any adjustments.”
The introduction of ads into chats means that information about you will be shared with advertisers. Even though this is a violation of your privacy, it doesn’t automatically signal a threat, depending on your own risk. WhatsApp already had access to that metadata, and it is important to keep in mind that even metadata such as who you are talking to can reveal an extraordinary amount of information about either of you.
When I asked how safe WhatsApp is for activists now, Bill Budington, Senior Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told me, “I think now there’s more caveats: usability *and sometimes* monetization. It’s not like they’re compromising their encryption, and they are putting ads in a segmented part of the app for now. So I think it’s just a matter of degrees and puts people at more risk of trackers, increases attack surface, and is unnecessary.”
Ultimately, the best way to avoid WhatsApp’s weakening privacy and increasing data collection is to use Signal. Keep in mind that switching to Telegram is not ideal, because of its weaker encryption methodology, lack of accountability, and position as a host for many far-right and violent groups and channels. Signal is still the best option for private communications.