As many of you guys know, Facebook owns WhatsApp, and for the longest time ever both apps and platforms remained relatively independent of each other, but that could soon change. According to a recent discovery by developer Javier Santos (via Cult of Android), it seems that in a future version of WhatsApp, there is mention about sharing data with Facebook.
According to the message in the screenshot above, it reads, “Share my WhatsApp account information with Facebook to improve my Facebook experience.” It is unclear as to what exactly this means, but it sounds like maybe it might have something to do with finding more friends on Facebook via your WhatsApp contacts, and possibly vice versa as well.
That being said, the good news is that in the discovery the feature was disabled by default, meaning that users still had the choice of turning it on if they wanted to. This distinction is important because while some features are well-intentioned, users do like being able to choose whether they want it turned on or off by themselves, especially since this seems to touch on the idea of privacy.
In any case like we said, perhaps this might show up in a future build of WhatsApp, so we guess we’ll just have to keep an eye out for it. In the meantime what do you guys think it could be about?