{"id":191380,"date":"2025-06-17T10:01:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-17T10:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/191380\/"},"modified":"2025-06-17T10:01:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T10:01:10","slug":"whatsapp-users-will-soon-get-ads-that-might-cause-backlash-in-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/191380\/","title":{"rendered":"WhatsApp users will soon get ads. That might cause backlash in Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n By&nbspPascale Davies, AP<\/b><\/p>\n

\n Published on
\n 17\/06\/2025 – 10:13 GMT+2<\/p>\n

\"\"ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n

WhatsApp<\/strong><\/a> said that users will start seeing adverts in parts of the app, as owner Meta Platforms moves to cultivate a new revenue stream by tapping the billions of people who use the messaging service.<\/p>\n

Advertisements will be shown only in the app’s Updates tab, which is used by as many as 1.5 billion people each day. However, they will not appear where personal chats are located, developers said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe personal messaging experience on WhatsApp isn\u2019t changing, and personal messages, calls and statuses are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be used to show ads,\u201d WhatsApp said in a blog post on Monday.<\/p>\n

It is a big change for the company, whose founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton vowed to keep the platform free of ads when they created it in 2009.<\/p>\n

Facebook purchased WhatsApp in 2014 and the pair left a few years later. Parent company Meta Platforms Inc. has long been trying to generate revenue from WhatsApp.<\/p>\n

WhatsApp said ads will be targeted to users based on information like their age, the country or city where they’re located, the language they’re using, the channels they’re following in the app, and how they’re interacting with the ads they see.<\/p>\n

WhatsApp said it will not use personal messages, calls and groups that a user is a member of to target ads to the user.<\/p>\n

The European Commission signalled last year that the move fails to comply with its Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).<\/p>\n

The European Centre for Digital Rights (noyb), led by privacy activist Max Schrems said that Meta\u2019s \u201cPay or Okay\u201d approach<\/a> effectively forces users to choose between privacy and affordability.<\/p>\n

“Meta is doing exactly the opposite of what EU law requires,” Schrems said in a statement. <\/p>\n

“The data of its various platforms gets linked, and users are tracked for advertising without any genuine choice. Without freely given consent, linking data and showing personalised advertising is clearly illegal,” he added.<\/p>\n

Noyb said it would examine Meta’s actions and “initiate procedures against the company “if necessary”.<\/p>\n

The details depend on Meta’s practical implementation and therefore cannot yet be assessed conclusively.<\/p>\n

Schrems said he expected a WhatsApp exodus to the messaging app Signal.<\/p>\n

\u201cSignal works just as well as WhatsApp, but is non-profit and donation-funded,” he said.<\/p>\n

WhatsApp unveiled three advertising features on Monday as it tries to monetise the app’s user base. Channels will also be able to charge users a monthly fee for subscriptions so they can get exclusive updates. <\/p>\n

Business owners will also be able to pay to promote their channel’s visibility to new users.<\/p>\n

Most of Meta’s revenue comes from ads. In 2025, the Menlo Park, California-based company’s revenue totalled $164.5 billion (\u20ac142 billion) and $160.6 billion (\u20ac138 billion) of it came from advertising.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By&nbspPascale Davies, AP Published on 17\/06\/2025 – 10:13 GMT+2 ADVERTISEMENT WhatsApp said that users will start seeing adverts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191381,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[7157,2000,299,5187,2557,597,598,599],"class_list":{"0":"post-191380","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-digital-markets-act","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-european","12":"tag-european-commission","13":"tag-mark-zuckerberg","14":"tag-meta","15":"tag-whatsapp"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114698130947382693","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}