WhatsApp launches global privacy campaign to address security concerns
Popular messaging app, WhatsApp is launching its first global privacy campaign in a bid to address the controversy that erupted after the release of its new privacy update.
The campaign, ‘Message Privately’ aims to showcase how WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption works in “everyday life” to protect user privacy with “industry-leading features”.
WhatsApp’s director of brand and consumer marketing Eshan Ponnadurai in a report by Marketing Week, said: “We know how important privacy is to our users. This year as a company, we’ve seen firsthand how we created a bit of confusion and uncertainty for our users, how concerned they were about their privacy and the worry that people might be reading their messages.”
“This campaign is very much coming out in the world to address some of that, and ensure people really understand and continue to understand that what they communicate on WhatsApp – the powerful things they say, the relationship they have – are always protected and truly theirs.”
Earlier in the year, the multi messaging app was met with backlash from its 2 billion users as the newly updated privacy policy stirred security concerns. In the terms of service and agreement, WhatsApp disclosed how the messaging platform intends to share user data with Facebook—its parent company. The company issued a deadline of February 8, 2021 for users to accept the new agreement in order to continue using the platform or risk their accounts being deleted.
Although WhatsApp tagged the security concerns as ‘misinformation’, the Privacy Policy expressly outlined how other Facebook company products which are also integrated with its services would receive information about what users share with them such as usage and log information, device and connection information, location information; and how businesses can use Facebook hosted services to store and manage their WhatsApp chats. Sitting at the top as the most used messaging app in the world, with about 2.5billions users, WhatsApp began to lose its users to rival messaging apps like Signal and Telegram.
According to Ponnadurai, success for the campaign will be measured on KPIs such as reputation, sentiment and brand health, adding that the brand does a lot of social listening and metrics that measure whether people believe WhatsApp is private are already “very strong” but it will continue to measure them to see how they are impacted by the campaign.
Created with agency BBDO, the campaign will be launched in phases, first in the UK and Germany, its largest markets by users, followed by Mexico, Indonesia, India and Brazil over the coming months.
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