The petition said the new policy, which is likely to come into force from September 25, may change the, "most valuable, basic and essential feature of WhatsApp by unilaterally threatening to take away the protection to privacy of details and data of its users and sharing the same with Facebook and all its group companies including for the objective of commercial advertising and marketing". The move prompted The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy to announce they would be filing a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Mubeen Khan, another IT expert said, "When a user registers with WhatsApp, all their contact list is pasted onto the WhatsApp servers, giving them access to the entire contact list, so with over a billion users worldwide, WhatsApp and Facebook can get access to many more contacts, who will eventually be sent targeted adverts, maybe through telemarketing or other applications". This understandably caused a bit of a stir among fans of the mobile messaging app, which consistently promises to protect user data from advertisers.

In the company's 2012 blog post, WhatsApp founder Jan Koun assured users that the company wouldn't harvest their data.

Facebook has said it complies with European privacy laws and has won appeals of privacy cases against it in Belgium and Brussels in recent months as well. As always, we consider our obligations when designing updates like this. "Their personal information should not be incorporated into Facebook's sophisticated data driven marketing business", said Katharina Kopp, Ph.D., and CDD's Director of Policy. Your data isn't even in the picture. The complaint also cites a remark in 2014 by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a news report, in which he stated that "we are absolutely not going to change plans around WhatsApp and the way it uses user data".

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Fox News is motioning to keep Tantaros's case out of the courtroom and compel arbitration, as stipulated in her contract. Parent company 21st Century Fox launched an investigation that turned up other women with similar complaints.

Though WhatsApp insists that third-party ads won't make their way into the platform, the move makes it easy to see how the company could change its stance on this as well.

"By coordinating more with Facebook, we'll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp", the company said. "Therefore, WhatsApp's proposed change in business practice constitutes a deceptive act or practice".

The plans of WhatsApp - which has long promised to safeguard the privacy of more than 1 billion users - had rung alarm bells among privacy advocates. This includes everything from lawsuits accusing the social media giant of posting users' data on its platform without their consent to the policy of having to use "real names' on profiles".

In response, Britain's data privacy regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), said it was monitoring the changes to ensure that the new policy stays within data protection laws. The spokesperson said that by allowing people to opt-out of this change that the company was "offering industry-leading choice to existing users about how their data is used".