Even before children join WhatsApp, Meta, the company owning WhatsApp, may already be building digital profiles about them through their parents’ usage.
This isn’t speculation, Meta’s data collection extends far beyond platform users. Through information from WhatsApp and integration with Facebook and Instagram, the company creates detailed profiles of people who have never consented to being tracked.
Before I continue, let me be clear: I’ve been guilty of most of the actions I describe in this article. I mean no judgment at all. I shared my contacts with WhatsApp too, long before it was acquired by Facebook, even though it felt like sharing too much. My intention is to share what I’ve learned and inform readers so that we can, I hope, decrease our online footprint a little, and in doing so, our children’s future one as well.
While WhatsApp cannot read messages directly, it collects extensive metadata. Metadata is data about the data and includes who you message, when you message, how often, group membership, contact lists, and other usage patterns. They can see you are part of a school parent group even if they cannot read the actual messages. Metadata can reveal a lot about someone’s life without accessing message content.
This metadata collection becomes even more problematic when you consider that Meta also owns Facebook and Instagram. All your activity on those platforms becomes aggregated into one Meta advertising profile. Every behaviour on any of these platforms provides Meta with additional information. For example, if on September 1st you proudly post a picture of your child in uniform with the message “First day of school!” and a few days later you join a WhatsApp group with parents who have posted similar first-day photos, these combined data points may be enough to link everyone together. Meta is now able to identify connections between parents in the same school or class.
Even if parents aren’t connected on Facebook, Meta can link them together through WhatsApp. This has happened to me personally. Although I have a Facebook account, I never use it anymore. However, the last time I logged in, I saw ‘Friend Suggestions’ for people I am connected with on WhatsApp. If Meta can infer from other platforms that you have children, those children may be connected and profiled through you.
Meta builds profiles of people who aren’t on their platforms through what are called “shadow profiles”. These are profiles of people who never signed up.
When you allow WhatsApp to access your contacts, you’re uploading everyone’s phone numbers and names to Meta’s servers, including people who don’t use WhatsApp. Meta then connects these contacts across all users who have those contacts, building a web of relationships between people.
Based on group memberships and messaging patterns, Meta can infer information about non-users. Over time, these inferences create detailed profiles of people who have never consented to being tracked. These profiles exist whether the person ever joins a Meta platform or not, built entirely from metadata and the connections between people.
What’s even more concerning is that they’re likely already building profiles about our children as well.
Meta clearly has the technical capacity to do all of this. The infrastructure exists, the data flows are in place, and the business incentives are clear. Although we can’t know the exact extent of their profiling, we know they’ve repeatedly violated privacy laws and pushed boundaries wherever possible.
The question isn’t whether Meta is doing these things, it’s whether you trust them with your family’s privacy. Do you trust they won’t harvest more data than they should? Do you trust they’ll wait until your children consent before tracking them?
This raises questions about parent groups on WhatsApp and whether we should be giving more data about ourselves to Meta without knowing how they use it or will use it in the future.
If you’d like to reduce your online footprint and want to start using WhatsApp less, perhaps starting with just a school parenting group, Signal delivers the same core functionality with minimal data collection.
For readers interested in exploring this topic further, here are some additional resources: