WhatsApp ads face no apparent legal pushback in terms of privacy norms, said industry experts, while privacy advocates argued ads still violate the privacy principles on which the app was created.
Competition and privacy lawyers said India is yet to enforce its data protection law, which will mandate consent compliance by the messenger platform for using location and other personal information for ads. Mishi Choudhary, founder of the digital rights advocacy group SFLC.in, pointed out that even the order issued by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) in November 2024 regarding the platform’s privacy policy was stayed by the NCLAT, leaving WhatsApp in the clear for now. She added that there is a possibility of another action by the CCI here, but viewed the developments as a failure on the government’s part to not protect user privacy from private players.
“All data-sharing apps should be ‘opt-in’ by default rather than ‘opt-out. People don’t understand half the things companies are doing and nobody explains it to them. Then companies say you can always opt out of it. More people are realising how they are being used as a tool about all of these matters. They’re also realising that everything is about advertising,” she said.
Similarly, Sanchit Vir Gogia, Chief Analyst & CEO at Greyhound Research, said the very act of monetising behavioural signals via an ads model represents “a functional erosion of WhatsApp’s once-sacrosanct privacy stance”.
“This shift confirms long-standing fears from privacy advocates that WhatsApp’s acquisition by Facebook (now Meta) would eventually see it folded into the company’s broader surveillance-based revenue model,” said Gogia, adding that untouched encryption does little to mitigate the perception of moving from a secure utility to an attention economy platform. Thus, it leads to a user experience that may feel familiar in form, but not in ethos, he said.
App founders not in favour of ads
Choudhary also questioned the use of a messaging app for ads in the first place, arguing that the original founders of WhatsApp, Brian Acton and Jan Koum, had not wanted ads when they made the platform.
“They are using location data, people’s preferences on ads and channels. Why use even that data? That’s not the point about a messaging app. This is about cramping a lot where that doesn’t belong. This is not the messaging app which Acton started,” said the rights advocate.
To Choudhary’s point, Acton and Koum had written a post, ‘Why We Don’t Sell Ads’, in 2012, which is still available on WhatsApp’s blog page. In the impassioned write-up, they had warned that “when advertising is involved you the user are the product”. The two also left Meta over this issue, with Acton stating: “I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise.” However, it is also worth noting that the ultimate thrust of the blog was towards charging people for using WhatsApp.
Subscription or ads?
According to Rahul Rai, anti-trust lawyer and partner at Axiom5, users today have to make their decisions about using app services based on the direct correlation between access to a free service and user privacy. For this reason, he described concerns about ads appearing on WhatsApp status as “misplaced”, since the platform needs to generate revenue to continue free services.
“WhatsApp is likely to emerge as an exceptional platform for advertising, especially considering its free availability to over 200 million users. It was always clear that this model would need to evolve, either by introducing a fee for individual users or by monetising through advertising,” he said.