in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn’t use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing “hundreds of pages of Facebook documents,” reported that Facebook “gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.”
Surprising? No. Appalling? Yes.
WhatsApp happens to be under Meta, but is highly disconnected from Instagram/Facebook/Messenger and other Meta made products, since WhatsApp was originally bought and its users are somewhat different than IG/FB users. A lot of people exist that have WhatsApp, but no “social media” presence, only because it allows to exist and function in society normally in many countries.