Facebook cannot collect data on WhatsApp users in Germany.

• Position: PRIVACY - Brief article

WhatsApp angered some users when it announced in August that in an effort to provide better service, it would begin sharing users' phone numbers and analytics data with Facebook which acquired WhatsApp in 2014.

The city of Hamburg, Germany's data protection commissioner, Johannes Caspar, has ordered Facebook to stop collecting and storing data on WhatsApp users in Germany and to delete all information on about 35 million German users that already had been forwarded from WhatsApp. The Hamburg regulator has authority over Facebook's activities in Germany because the company's German subsidiary is based in the city, according to the New York Times.

Caspar said that neither WhatsApp nor Facebook had received individuals' permission to share the information and had potentially misled people over how their data would be used in the future. He added that millions of people whose contact details had been uploaded to...