I was recently on a call with a dear childhood friend, discussing a mutual friend’s smoking habits. Concerned about his lust for a smoke every 10 minutes, we were wondering how we could encourage him to kick the butt.
When I logged on to Instagram soon after the call, I found a very interesting advertisement about an e-cigarette from a popular brand, and its proven prowess in getting addicts to quit smoking. I was petrified -- the Cambridge Analytica scandal was still fresh in my mind, and I had never touched a cigarette, let alone search for ways to kick the habit.
Was Instagram listening in on my calls? Had WhatsApp secretly sold me out? The ocean of possibilities was endless. And with WhatsApp’s latest announcement of displaying ads in its stories, my mind spiralled into the ghastly experience with Instagram.
WhatsApp recently announced that ads shown in its stories section would be its primary source of revenue in the future. This should not come as a shock, seeing that data is no longer the new oil today -- it is now a very real form of currency that the world trades in. There is no rational reason for WhatsApp to shy away from using its users’ data to display advertisements.
For a case that I recently did for a leading Indian e-commerce company, I found that the maximum amount of users’ time on their smartphones was spent on WhatsApp, followed closely by Facebook. This itself flows from logic in our own lives.
Smartphone usage in India has increased from 199.08 million users in 2015 to close to 340 million users in 2018, and with data becoming increasingly accessible to rural and low income urban users, social media is the biggest beneficiary. In fact, according to different estimates, digital marketing in India is growing at an annual rate of 25-40%.
In a survey involving a focus group of 13 participants from different backgrounds in the low income urban group in Mumbai, instant messaging was the clear winner in terms of time spent online by the users, with WhatsApp taking the major chunk, owing to its ubiquitous nature.
WhatsApp, participants said, was the best means for them to communicate with their families. With users being able to communicate in vernacular languages, WhatsApp is now as basic a feature in smartphones as the camera provided by manufacturers.
Data consumption is primarily driven by text through WhatsApp, and pictures and videos through WhatsApp, Facebook, and other social media websites and applications. The importance of consumption of video can be understood by the fact that almost every news app today has a “stories” section, with headlines that can be consumed in less than a minute.
There are no free lunches, however, and it has long been understood that if we are using free web services from the likes of Facebook and Google, then we are paying for them with data about ourselves.
WhatsApp will soon join this club, which led to disagreements between WhatsApp’s co-founder Jan Koum and Facebook over the way Facebook planned to monetize the data collected from WhatsApp’s gigantic user base. I remember the initial days of WhatsApp charging users $1 a year, and my apprehension about using it.
That I was a college student with better use of my father’s money did not impact this decision. It was only after WhatsApp made the first year complementary that I decided to download the app, and the company has grown by leaps and bounds since then.
The data that can be collected by the company, for obvious reasons, has increased exponentially, and with the potential to use data from users’ businesses and desktops, the sky seems to be the limit for WhatsApp.
Up until a few days ago, I saw WhatsApp being a great tool for ads and marketing through messages forwarded to the right audience, annoying as it might have been. WhatsApp’s recent move, however, will see big and small brands scurrying to WhatsApp to reach out to potential consumers.
Bangladesh is not far behind India in terms of internet usage on smartphones, with over 76.22 million active users of internet on smartphones.
A staggering $100 billion is spent on digital marketing each year, and with rising data consumption, Facebook has a terrifying monopolistic position across the world, with an arsenal that includes Instagram and WhatsApp, due to which it can dictate terms to any company and consumer it wants. It doesn’t even face any problems of cannibalization of its own offerings. Even though WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram have a huge overlap in terms of users, consumers are not really left with a choice -- they will be hounded regardless of the apps they use.
Seeing ads in feeds might not be a concern for a lot of us, with a huge majority already exposed to ads on Facebook, Twitter, and video streaming sites. But seeing an ad for a particular brand’s smartwatch after getting my watch repaired from the neighbourhood watch store is an infringement of my privacy, especially when I did not touch my phone the entire time I was there. So is snooping on my telephone conversations.
Development in both India and Bangladesh has a lot to cover, as far as data privacy is concerned. With these harsh realities, the questions that arise are difficult -- can we, as consumers, really avoid selling our data to these companies? More importantly, does it matter to enough consumers for it to be a concern?
But perhaps the most important question that the world, as a whole, needs to ask itself is, with privacy algorithms like end-to-end encryption in place for all messages sent over WhatsApp, where exactly will WhatsApp, and consequently advertisers, get their data from? The answer is a scary one.
Rishabh Kochhar is a student of Information Management in Mumbai.
