Meta to squeeze money from WhatsApp with Cloud API for businesses At Meta's first Conversations keynote yesterday, the company announced the WhatsApp Cloud API, aimed at improving the customer service experience for businesses of all sizes. Meta already has the WhatsApp Business API, the first revenue-generating enterprise product for the otherwise free messaging app, where companies pay …
Indeed - and it won't be just your company email address that WA will get from the companies - so you get profiled one way or the other via the cookies they put to support your "work" email/and even if not linking via email addresses, they can mine the data and find correlation by profiling other information.
Using WhatsApp for business is not without its pitfalls and difficulties ......... https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/regulators-engaging-systematic-probe-top-bankers-who-used-unauthorized-messaging-apps ....... even though it has been reported to be a Parliamentary business favourite too by those who would choose to be less than transparent in ...... well, one imagines all manner of shady shenanigans and shifty sculduggery for which they would not wish to be held responsible and accountable for.
It's also ideal for sending out party invitations. And if said invitation came via the Business api, then the grand formage himself could claim that the event was a business related work event - albeit one with cakes, booze and party hats.
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When the T&Cs changed a while ago a lot of people said they'd stop using it. The end result for me is that ~90% of messages still go through WhatsApp and I have a load of other messaging apps of which each is used by a tiny number of people....
They haven't yet gone through with those changes which would allow them to merge data from the various platforms and sell it to advertisers. I know quite a few people who will delete it if they're ever required to agree to the new T&Cs.
Technically, it's not a very interesting platform but at least it uses Signal's protocol for encryption. If you compare it with Telegram then you can see what happens once big companies buy these things up. Telegram continues to improve scale and firewall evasion while adding goodies to the clients. Yes, I know encryption is neither brilliant nor is your data secure unless you enable private messenging for everything.
I don't use it and find it irksome when companies that have moved over to it entirely (KLM, I can't fly with you because you seem to require it). If you're going to use additional channels then make sure you use at least two different suppliers… Also, compared with Telegram the API really is fairly basic which just shows the ones calling the shots don't seem to use it.
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As a small business owner who uses WhatsApp business, I find the out of hours automated response feature extremely useful.
It means anyone reaching out to me out of hours will get an automated response informing them of my operating hours. Which in turn means a) I get to switch off from work and b) they get to know I'm not ignoring them and they can expect to receive a response when I'm back at work.
I know from feedback that they do appreciate it.
As a user, I want to keep my Whatsapp for personal use and hate that some companies are moving most of their customer service to that. As a small business owner, I'm apprehensive to get hooked into using Whatsapp and then getting dependent on it why Mark has access to the gobs of data that will be generated for him to exploit. For now, not feeding that shark.
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