WhatsApp and Facebook have long exchanged valuable metadata - “data about the data,” as Trahan put it - which offers insight into consumers’ behavior and is extremely important for advertisers. Lawmakers’ prolonged impasse on a national privacy law has left the door open for the most influential players in the tech world - including Facebook, Apple and Google - to self-regulate and write their own playbooks for how data can be shared across companies and around the world.

Technology companies are growing and innovating faster than laws and leaders in Washington can move, and it’s unclear how the new administration and Congress will catch up. The conflict highlights the mounting struggle on the part of Congress to check the power of tech companies, even when lawmakers’ constituents are up in arms. “Facebook should uphold their promise, and that of WhatsApp’s founders, to prioritize the privacy of their users.” Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), who has led a push by some House Democrats to force Facebook to reverse course, said in an interview. The messaging platform is also set to support stickers 'soon', including third-party ones made by developers.“We can’t keep letting the largest companies in the world, founded in the United States, break their promises,” Rep. These options can also be found in Group Info under the 'Group Settings' section.Īt the recent Facebook F8 developers conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed WhatsApp will soon support group video calling, although he offered no timeline for the feature's introduction. In addition, group admins can now choose who can change a group's subject, icon, and description. To remove an admin, select the user in 'Group Info' and select 'Dismiss As Admin'. The group administrator functions have also been tweaked in the latest version of the app, so that group admins can now revoke admin rights from other participants. The WhatsApp changelog for version 2.18.51 indicates support for Facebook and Instagram videos has now been greenlighted by the developers, although our tests suggest the feature is still being rolled out. However, clicking on an Instagram or Facebook video link kicks users out of the app and into the respective hosting platform. YouTube videos have been playable for some time in WhatsApp, which also offers a Picture-in-Picture mode for continuing to watch while switching between chat threads. WhatsApp for iOS has been updated to support inline Instagram and Facebook video playback, according to the messaging platform's latest release notes.

Facebook whatsapp update