⚠️ Another day, another data breach. But this one is different and has been happening for 10 years.

⚠️ This case is a reminder that we are losing control over our data in the first place.

⚠️ The most disturbing insight? Your personal information can be exposed even if you never gave consent.

All it takes is a friend or family member who has your number saved, taps “Allow contacts access,” and suddenly your identity becomes part of the data network.

The WhatsApp number breach on Facebook is what personal data hijacking looks like in real life. Big tech companies wth their intentional design choices that make your privacy dependent on your personal network / your clique. What was happening? Numbers of contacts have been transferred between WhatsApp and Facebook without consent.

Platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp aim at the lack of user urgency. They build systems where your data and the data of your family are shared, uploaded, and cross‑linked — often by default and without your control.

The fact that the first instance ruling took 10 years is ridiculous anyway. But the fact that the ruling is now just hanging in the air, with no one doing anything about it, shows that the state is helpless against big corporations. Consumers need to know this.

This is my message as a data protection advocate.

References

Germany’s highest court stops Facebook cross‑platform data merging https://www.euractiv.com/section/data-protection/news/germanys-highest-court-orders-facebook-to-stop-cross-platform-data-sharing

Regulator stops Facebook from gathering WhatsApp data [2021] https://www.theafricancourier.de/news/germany-stops-facebook-from-gathering-whatsapp-data-of-users

Court rules: No data transfer from WhatsApp to Facebook (German source) https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/digitale-welt/datenschutz/gericht-entscheidet-keine-datenuebertragung-von-whatsapp-an-facebook-118180

WhatsApp shared your contacts with Facebook – court puts a stop to it (German source) video: “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7MbRWnm8Vw”