If you use WhatsApp (and you are one of 2 billion if you do) you will have seen messages inviting you to accept new terms, in which WhatsApp and Facebook can share data. You can skip them for now, but you will need to accept them by 8th February to continue using WhatsApp.
However, Facebook says that if you live in the ‘European Region‘ which includes the United Kingdom, they won’t share the data as it is against data protection law (we are subject to the terms from WhatsApp Ireland limited).
Dutch MEP Paul Tang tweeted a good summary: “Facebook grants itself access to all of our WhatsApp-data unless…. you are living in the EU. That is why data protection matters.”
Thankfully we have UK GDPR but even without it, it would not be ‘all of our WhatsApp data’. WhatsApp says it has no plans to remove the end-to-end encryption that makes it a secure messaging service, much to the annoyance of some security services. It’s the metadata that Facebook seem to want, in order to provide all the helpful services which result in more targeted ads.