Privacy

Hide Your ‘Last Seen’, Photo and Status: WhatsApp

Whatsapp had become stalking tool for many people. Simply add someones number into your phone contact and get to know their ‘last seen’ date/time, their status update and their profile photo(hmm this one is important!)

WhatsApp for iOS had this option to hide ‘last seen’ date/time, but android version lacked it for some unknown reason.

Privacy On WhatsApp: android
Now WhatsApp users on android can set these privacy settings for ‘Last Seen’, ‘Profile Photo’ and ‘Status’. You can individually set all these to ‘Everyone’, ‘My Contacts’ only and ‘Nobody’ except me!

Download New WhatsApp: Since the latest version of WhatsApp for android isn’t yet available on Google Play Store, you can download it directly from WhatsApp website.
(It’s 13.65 MB in size)

Phone Settings: Go to your android phone’s settings -> Security -> and check ‘Unknown sources’.

Install New WhatsApp: Now click on the downloaded .apk file and install it.

WhatsApp Settings: Go to ‘settings’ -> Account -> Privacy -> Who can see my personal info

Do not forget to set back your security option on your phone after installing new WhatsApp apk file. Go to your phone settings -> Security -> and UNCHECK ‘Unknown sources’.

Looks like a good move as soon as Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 Billion.

Facebook Further Explaining Their Policy

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook updated their “Terms“. And there was a lot of discussion about it in the blogosphere, forums and on twitter. According to the new Terms, Facebook now reserves all rights to the “User Content”, means any photos, text, link, audio, video, designs, ads and anything else that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. “Post” means to upload, post, transmit, share, store, link to or otherwise make available on or through the Facebook Service, even if you choose to close your account on the network or if your account gets banned or disabled for some reason.

While its a good practice to read the privacy policy and then signup for any service, but have a look at the lengthy terms on every social networking, social bookmarking, social media sites. If you keep on reading them, you will just have to keep on reading them(as they get updated now and then, making it more complex!).

After reading the changes made by Facebook many people expressed their disappointment. Totally Facebook was in News at many places.

Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg(Founder of Facebook) wrote a blog post to clarify the issue. You can read the entire story, at On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information.
Here is an important excerpt from the post..

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

Another concern was, Facebook reserves all rights to the “User Content”, even after you choose to close your account on the network or if your account gets banned or disabled for some reason. Here is what Mark Zuckerberg has to say

When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work.

Mark Zuckerberg also assures(in the blog post) that they wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want.

One thing to note here is people who want full ownership and control over their information can turn off access to it at any time, by changing things in their settings panel.

Facebook claims that these changes in their Terms will be made simpler and more clear over time.
For now the issue is bit cleared and Facebook got a lot of attention in a short period of time(Kind of viral marketing 🙂 ).

Update: Facebook reverted to its previous terms of service, with this public announcement from Mark Zuckerberg.

In the blog post, he writes, “Going forward, we’ve decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don’t plan to leave it there for long.”

Privacy Policy — Visitors please read

Here are the list of things which we expect to be followed by all our visitors, to maintain a healthy environment.

Update:
* Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on our site.
* Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to our sites and other sites on the Internet.
* Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

1. Please use comment section to get involved in a particular discussion.

2. Don’t use abusing language. This will hurt your online reputation. Please respect other commentators and have a good interaction.

Comment mainly for exchange of ideas and to gain knowledge. Don’t just comment to get link back.
Read the post before commenting.

3. We have purposefully not placed any advertisements inside the post, as we consider good user experience as our primary goal, than making money through advertising.

4. Most of the popular sites have placed CPM(Cost Per 1000 Impression) ads below the comment section, which gets a very little visitors attention. But still the ad generates good revenue, as it is a CPM ad.

But we have not placed such ads also, just to make sure that our website loads faster (again, to make our visitors experience great).

This does not mean that we are not bothered about the advertisers. We are also concerned about the advertisers. All the advertisers advertising on this blog should get value. Think yourself as an advertiser. And your ad is an CPM ad. Now will you be happy to pay for showing your ad in some corner ( which draws no/less user attention) ?

Such an ad campaign would be a loss at the end of the day, with no conversion.

So we have placed limited number of ads and are placed in places which are hard to go unnoticed, but still does not interrupt reading the post.

5. I do not, I have not and I will not link to anyone in my posts in exchange for money or other incentives.

6. I enjoy this blog. I enjoy writing in this blog. And I would love to help all my readers. Actually this is the main purpose behind this blog.

7. We have implemented language translation tool in this blog, so utilize it, if you are not comfortable with English.

8. If you want to quote from Technotip.org, then quote only excerpts ( as it is in our article ), and give a credit link to the exact article above or below your post(Don’t just link to the homepage).

9. Print media’ s must contact me before reprinting the article. Point number 9 also holds good for print media.

10. We consider plagiarism very seriously. And we know all the measures to handle with such issues.

*. And please do not block the advertisements in this blog, using any softwares, scripts etc. Just read the contents you like. Blocking ads will not give value to advertisers and advertisements are the primary source of income to maintain this blog, to host this blog, to take care of all the expenses in the way of blogging.

Note: This policy is subject to change/update at any time, and changes made will be effective immediately.

We have left the comment section even to this page….Just because to get your opinion/feedback about our policies.

And please tell us for any other good policy, which must be added or which must be removed from our list..