WhatsApp Will Share Your Phone Number With Facebook

If you use WhatsApp — the global messaging service with more than 1 billion users across the world — Facebook will soon know your phone number and a lot more information.

WhatsApp announced Thursday that it will be sharing more data, including phone numbers, with Facebook, which bought WhatsApp two years ago for nearly $20 billion. It's a major shift in privacy policy for a company which has made that a central feature of its service.

WhatsApp is a messaging app used worldwide because of its ease of communication with people across platforms and in other countries.

By sharing more data, WhatsApp says, Facebook will be able to "offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them." Existing users will be able to opt out of sharing their phone number with Facebook.

Still, the move is sure to irk some of the app's longtime users.

One of WhatsApp's biggest selling points was its staunch commitment to privacy. The app has long maintained that it was not going to share any user data.

"We do not use your mobile phone number or other Personally Identifiable Information to send commercial or marketing messages without your consent or except as part of a specific program or feature for which you will have the ability to opt-in or opt-out," the app's terms of service agreement has long read.

On Thursday, WhatsApp said that some of its other security features aren't going anywhere, such as end-to-end encryption. That makes it so that nobody, including WhatsApp itself, can read users' conversations or see photos they are sharing.

Read WhatsApp's full announcement here.

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