Ads are coming to WhatsApp
The move reveals Facebook’s intention to harvest yet more of your personal data for gain.
So, finally, the inevitable has happened. Facebook has completed its mission to turn the world’s greatest private, ad-free communications platform into a massive pipe to suck up the personal data of billions of people and sell it on to advertisers.
This is what we now know as “surveillance capitalism”, as defined in the best-selling book of the same name by Soshana Zuboff. And we also know, thanks to a recent announcement by Facebook at its recent Annual Marketing Summit in the Netherlands, that the ads will look like this:
And in case you’re thinking that this whole surveillance capitalism thing is just a conspiracy theory, you should check out last Sunday’s Commencement address by Apple CEO Tim Cook at Stanford University:
“Too many [in tech] seem to think that good intentions excuse away harmful outcomes,” says Cook [timecode 6:26], “but whether you like it or not, what you build and what you create define who you are. It feels a bit crazy that anyone should have to say this. But if you’ve built a chaos factory, you can’t dodge responsibility for the chaos.”
Or for the ultimately numbing effect it will have on our society. “In a world without digital privacy, even if you have done nothing wrong but think differently, you begin to censor yourself. … The chilling effect of digital surveillance is profound, and it touches everything.”
This is why Apple has just announced a “private log in” feature, that will allow people to register with websites in a way that will prevent those sites from garnering and exploiting their data. And it’s why, here at Hospify, we’ve spent the last few years designing and building an alternative to WhatsApp that allows doctors, nurses and patients to communicate with each other about health matters without their privacy being compromised.
According to a survey recently conducted by EY and announced at the Telegraph Frontline HeathTech Conference in May, 60% of doctors “believe that smartphones will become the main tool to help connect patients and healthcare professionals” within the next few year.
It is therefore clearly more important than ever for the 600,000 or so clinicians in the UK currently using tools like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to communicate, to switch to using tools like Hospify.
So if you work in health and you haven’t done it already, what are you waiting for! Hospify is free and is available right now in the Android and Apple app stores. It’s a messaging tool that looks and feels like WhatsApp, but it doesn’t serve you ads or monetise your data, it doesn’t even store your data, it’s compliant with GDPR, UK data protection and NHS information governance, and the mobile app is free for anyone to use. Go and check it out today.
