By Data mining, insight generation and selling the insights to online platforms. If you are an analyst, you can stop here, else read on. Companies like Facebook and Google are extremely clever. They make use of Barter system! Here's how it works. They give their service without any money payment and name it "Free of cost" to attract people. Since it is free, huge number of people use the service. Whatsapp keeps track of all the messages you send and searches for keywords. For example, if you text "I need X brand shoes", its algorithms are smart enough to understand your positive interest towards "brand X" and then sell this data to online selling platform like Amazon, e-bay, etc. Facebook is brilliant to understand the mentality of people as people won't use any app if they show ads or charge money for the service they provide. Thus they choose to exchange your personal information for the service that they provide (Barter system I talked about earlier). Now this is no way illegal as the Whatsapp terms and conditions clearly states all these facts but you have agreed to it without reading it! After Whatsapp carried out the end to end encryption, as per Whatsapp, they are not going to use your chat messages for their marketing business (read targeted ads). The messages are encrypted end to end, from one app to app on the other end, so their servers can’t comprehend the information. But, according to their T&C of service, they are going to use the following data:
- Your Account Information
- Phone numbers in your mobile address book
- Profile name
- Profile picture
- Status message (Status photo)
- Usage and Log Information
- Information about user activity
- Log files
- Diagnostic, crash, website, and performance logs and reports.
- Device and Connection Information
- Cookies
- Etc etc etc
Which are more convenient than reading chats! Once they get all these data, they can understand who is interested in what and then show specific ad to each specific person!
Here's a video which explains it more:
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