Many users across the world reacted to the move on social media swiftly and adversely, with many encouraging others to boycott the chat service and also offering up or discussing alternatives.

Elon Musk, who co-founded and leads Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and the Boring Company, and has recently become the richest man in the world, appealed to people to switch to more encrypted apps than WhatsApp and Facebook and specifically mentioned Signal when asked about a safer alternative by his followers.

WhatsApp will shortly start to share users data with Facebook as a condition of use of the application, according to a statement from the social network.

“By coordinating more with Facebook, we’ll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp,” the statement said.

“WhatsApp users are receiving an in-app notice today regarding the service’s new terms and privacy policy. The notice, as you can see in the attached screenshot, talks about three key updates that affect how WhatsApp processes your data, how businesses can use Facebook hosted services to store and manage their WhatsApp chats, and how WhatsApp will soon partner with Facebook to offer deeper integrations across all of the latter’s products.”

“It further reveals that these changes will go into effect on February 8th, and users will have no choice but to accept these changes if they wish to continue using WhatsApp,” the statement added. (ILKHA)