Perception and Privacy
I’ve written a few articles about the perception of quality over the last year. When we think about quality, perception is one of the most important aspects. At the end of the day it is about how your product is perceived by the consumer of that product. Defects in the eyes of the consumer would diminish the quality of the product. Today, another aspect has come to the forefront when it comes to peoples perception. A perceived lack of privacy has turned millions off of WhatsApp messenger service. Many have been searching and migrating to alternatives. Looking for an alternative messaging service where their privacy is better protected. What caused this negative perception of WhatsApp's privacy to spread like wildfire? What can we learn from it?
The Guardian reported that this mess was all caused by “A poorly explained update to its [Whatsapps] terms of service”. Due to this, the company is in a scramble to recover its user base and prevent them from leaving the platform. As a band-aid on the situation, to let the scar heal a bit. WhatsApp has postponed the date that the new terms go into effect. As well as proactively looking to clarify.
Will this be enough? I honestly don’t know. I myself am seriously considering leaving the WhatsApp platform regardless of the damage control being done now. It has ruined my already sceptical perception of WhatsApps parent company. They don't have the best reputation on data, and this didn’t help them one bit. It has tipped the scale in the completely wrong direction.
What have I learned from this? It has reminded me yet again how careful we must be with our products. How we must pay attention to the smallest, minutest details when testing our software. We must look at how we word something, what language we use, and how we communicate our message to our users. We shouldn’t be in a situation where we have to put out something like this on our blog:
“We’ve heard from so many people how much confusion there is around our recent update. There's been a lot of misinformation causing concern and we want to help everyone understand our principles and the facts…” [Whatsapp Blog]
To be fair it is commendable that WhatsApp is taking steps to rectify the situation. It might be a little too late! The damage is done. Whether it was confusion, misinformation, or legitimate concern it will be hard and quite costly for WhatsApp to come back from this.
I am sure other companies that you and I interact with daily most likely share similar data with businesses or use it for marketing. The difference is that the perception of privacy has been maintained with them. In contrast for WhatsApp now it is an uphill battle to restore the trust in the privacy of their product.
The bottom line here is that perception is key to the success of your software. Pay attention to everything that may affect perception because it really does matter!
Why am I still planning to leave WhatsApp before this new policy goes into effect? In the FAQS on the Whatsapp website it states:
“...we’re giving businesses the option to use secure hosting services from Facebook to manage WhatsApp chats with their customers, answer questions, and send helpful information like purchase receipts. But whether you communicate with a business by phone, email, or WhatsApp, it can see what you’re saying and may use that information for its own marketing purposes, which may include advertising on Facebook…”
What might change my mind? Give me the option to turn this off as a regular user from my device. Putting in place a switch that I can control would convey to me that they do genuinely care about people's privacy. That they are willing to allow the user to opt-out. Not have just two harsh option of either 1) accept it or 2) get out completely. By doing it this way WhatsApp is almost opening the door and showing people the door. So they have no one to blame but themselves if they continue down this road.
----
Authored by: @SufyanFarooqi