Everyone probably knows companies such as Facebook and Google, but did you know that these companies actually own a fair number of popular services and software that you might be using on a daily basis? For those who follow the tech news, chances are you might be familiar with this, but a recent survey found that a good many people don’t.A recent survey conducted by DuckDuckGo has found that 50% of US users surveyed don’t know who owns WhatsApp, and that 60% of users surveyed don’t know who owns Waze either. For those who don’t know, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook (acquired in a deal reported to be worth $19 billion) while Waze is owned by Google. So what’s the big deal if you don’t know who owns these companies?
According to DuckDuckGo, “This means that a majority of Americans who are using WhatsApp and/ or Waze are doing so without realising that all of their information, whether it be routes, travel time, messages, photos, or location data, is privy to Facebook (for WhatsApp) and Google (for Waze).”
This means that for those out there who want to delete their Facebook accounts or hide their location from Google, using apps and services like WhatsApp and Waze means that your information is still being sent to those companies. DuckDuckGo had also previously conducted a survey that revealed that more than 50% of American adult users did not know that Facebook owns Instagram, while 44.6% did not know that Google owns YouTube either.