At the beginning of the year, WhatsApp took the seemingly mundane step of updating its terms of use and privacy policy, mostly focused on the app's business offerings. The changes sparked a major backlash, though, because they inadvertently highlighted WhatsApp's years-old policy of sharing certain user data, like phone numbers, with parent company Facebook. Rather than change the policy that sparked the controversy, WhatsApp instead moved the deadline for users to accept it from the original date of February 8 to Saturday. If you don't? WhatsApp will become unusable.
But not all at once. If you haven't accepted the new policy by now, you'll start to see more pop-ups in WhatsApp outlining the changes with a big green Accept button at the bottom. If you tap it, WhatsApp will continue to share certain account data of yours with Facebook. If you'd rather not agree, you'll at first be able to hit a back arrow in the upper left corner of the overlay. Over time, though, the pop-ups will appear more frequently. Eventually you won't be able to click away at all, and the app's functionality will start to degrade.
WhatsApp originally indicated in February that anyone who declined the updates would immediately lose functionality. But the company has since opted to let the wheels very gradually come off the car over several weeks before the app careens into a ditch and stops working altogether.
“For the last several weeks we've displayed a notification in WhatsApp providing more information about the update,” the company said in a whatsapp privacy policy kicked
