Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow.
Earlier this month, WhatsApp issued a new privacy policy along with an ultimatum: accept these new terms, or delete WhatsApp from your smartphone. But the new privacy policy wasn’t particularly clear, and it was widely misinterpreted to mean WhatsApp would be sharing more sensitive personal data with its parent company Facebook. Unsurprisingly, it prompted a fierce backlash, with many users threatening to stop using the service.
WhatsApp soon issued a clarification, explaining that the new policy only affects the way users’ accounts interact with businesses (i.e., not with their friends) and does not mandate any new data collection. The messaging app also delayed the introduction of the policy by three months. Crucially, WhatsApp said, the new policy doesn’t affect the content of your chats, which remain protected by end-to-end encryption – the “gold standard” of security that means no one can view the content of messages, even WhatsApp, Facebook, or the authorities.
But the damage had already been done. The bungled communication attempts have raised awareness that WhatsApp does collect a lot of data, and some of this could be shared with Facebook. The BBC reported that Signal was downloaded 246,000 times worldwide in the week before WhatsApp announced the change on 4 January, and 8.8m times the week after.
Signal, a secure messaging app recommended by authorities such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Edward Snowden, has been the main beneficiary of the WhatsApp exodus. Another messaging app, Telegram, has also experienced an uptick in downloads, but Signal has been topping the charts on the Apple and Android app stores.
Signal benefits from being the most similar to WhatsApp in terms of features, while Telegram has had problems as a secure and private messaging app, with its live location feature recently coming under fire for privacy infringements. Crucially, Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default, instead storing your data in the cloud. Signal is end-to-end encrypted, collects less data than Telegram and stores messages on your device rather than in the cloud.