German privacy watchdog picks on Facebook

hamburg - Facebook should immediately stop storing and accessing data from the approximately 35 million German users of its messaging service WhatsApp. This has given a privacy watchdog in Hamburg Tuesday.

Facebook took WhatsApp in February 2014 for about $ 16 billion. Until recently, kept the company strictly segregated client data from the chat service from that of its own social network. But recently it matched the terms of use so that exchange was possible.

This change may, however, not acceptable according to the Hamburg privacy watchdog. Two years ago promised that the details of WhatsApp users would not be shared with Facebook. That this should happen now, without asking for explicit consent, is contrary to German privacy laws.