Whatsapp rebuked over stored contacts privacy policy

The Whatsapp messaging app has been criticised after a joint investigation by Dutch and Canadian regulators.
Investigators said that when smartphone owners installed the app it asked to access their address books.
They said the problem was that it then transmitted all the contained phone numbers to its servers, and failed to delete those belonging to people who had not signed up to the service.
Whatsapp has not commented on the report at this time.
The Dutch Data Protection Authority has said that it could take punitive action if the Silicon Valley firm behind the product does not change it.
WhatsApp was launched in 2009 and allows users to send each other text, image, video and audio messages.
It works across Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Phone and Symbian platforms and does not charge a fee per message.
Instead some users pay its developer an annual $0.99 (63p) subscription, while others face a one-off cost to download the app. This has helped make it a popular alternative to SMS and MMS message services.
On installation users are asked permission to share their contacts so that the software can identify which of their friends are also on the service.
The regulators noted that only iPhone users running the latest version of Apple's iOS operating system were given the option of manually adding contacts rather than allowing their address book to be scanned.
They noted that although it was not illegal for the firm to have copied over data belonging to non-users, the problem was that it did not delete the information after running the friend-identification check.