It might sound odd but over 50 percent of Americans who’ve used WhatsApp in the previous six weeks don’t have any idea who owns the popular mobile messaging platform.
According to a poll by DuckDuckGo, the US-based privacy-protecting search engine, just more than half of US taxpayers (50.42 percent) don’t understand WhatsApp is possessed by Facebook.
“We randomly chosen 1,297 US adults (not only DuckDuckGo users) that are jointly demographically like the general population of US adults and researched them on August 16, 2018.
“Half of people who used WhatsApp at the previous six months were not aware that Facebook possesses WhatsApp,” said the poll.
The findings also revealed that almost 60 percent of individuals who used Waze at the previous six months did not understand that Google possesses Waze.
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Waze is a favorite GPS navigation software. It works on smartphones and tablet computers which have GPS support.
“This usually means a vast majority of Americans that are using WhatsApp and/ or Waze do this without realising that all their advice, if it be paths, travel time, messages, photographs, or location information, is conducive to Facebook (such as WhatsApp) and Google (such as Waze),” stated the survey.
According to the poll, the lack of awareness within Facebook and Google’s reach is much more bemused as more and more Americans are seeking to take charge of their privacy online.
A previous poll by DuckDuckGo discovered that 56.9 percent of American adults had been unaware that Facebook possesses Instagram and 44.6 percent didn’t also know that Google owns YouTube.
Facebook at 2014 obtained WhatsApp for $19 billion. The two WhatsApp co-founders – Brian Acton and Jan Koum – have stopped Facebook reportedly over information privacy and Facebook’s strategies to monetise WhatsApp.
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