Yahoo! is known as one of largest Internet companies in the world, though its market share of technology and world wide web sectors isn’t as substantial as when it was one of the first companies to navigate its way into the then-untraveled business side of the Internet.
In 2007, then-former employees of the company left to travel across the South American continent instead of piling themselves to proverbial death with work, work, and more work, as employees of tech and Internet companies all too frequently are guilty of.
After not getting jobs at Facebook they so desperately wanted, the duo decided to create a voice over Internet protocol mobile application that allowed people to both call and message one another. In 2009, WhatsApp was born.
Since, the company has grown into one of the largest messaging and calling services across the globe, and since as acquired by tech giant Facebook to the tune of $19-odd billion a few years ago.
Just recently, as of Tuesday, April 24, 2018, WhatsApp announced that it would no longer allow people under 16 years of age to use its mobile-app-based services across the greater European continent. Although the youngest age of WhatsApp users was previously 16, the lowest age requirement was then dropped to 13. WhatsApp decided raising the age back to 16 years of age was the best decision the company could make in the name of its welfare.
WhatsApp decided to make the change in preparation for rules suggested and drafted by the European Union, a network of 28 countries across Europe, regarding data privacy mandates that are slated to begin being policed next month, in May 2018.
A brand-spanking-new terms and conditions of use agreement, in conjunction with a free-standing contract regarding WhatsApp’s privacy policy, will be required to be signed by all users starting next month, including a necessary response to the application automatically asking users if they’re 16 years of age or older.
Virtually all tech companies aren’t able to reliably verify their users’ ages on a large scale, at least not when they’re dealing with people interested in using services they provide – hiring people to work for them is an entirely different story.
Although Facebook owns WhatsApp, it isn’t taking the same avenue to impending data privacy rules laid out by the European Union in the form of the European General Data Protection Regulation legislation, changing the minimum age from 13 to just 15.
