MercadoLibre, confusion about their privacy policy
MercadoLibre seemingly confused about privacy policies
Background
[Incident]
Signing up for an account with MercadoLibre
There are many reasons to buy from Mercado Libre, especially when, like me, you are a citizen of the USA and live in Latin Amercia.
Like Amazon, you cannot buy items from their store without an account. If I may speculate on the reason for this, it would be the credit card regulations that a vendor may not store a complete credit card number without a subscription, or a continuing account agreement with the customer.
Signing up for an account with ML is fairly simple: they want you to enter your email address, your first and last names, and your cell phone number. I'm pretty certain that the procedure for anyone, at least in Mexico, is the same. During this process, ML clearly states that they want you to read and approve of their terms of service, and their privacy policy. A potential account holder has to click a box indicating that they have done so. ( links to both documents are on the same page as the clickbox).
When you enter your phone number, ML indicates that they will send a verification code to your cell phone, but specifically via WhatsApp.
Now, I had at this point approved of their privacy policy. But, by insisting on using WhatsApp, which is owned and controlled by Facebook, whose privacy policies have changed dramatically through the years ((https://techscience.org/a/2015081102/)) and mostly not in favor of user privacy (link), I refused to continue further. I was willing to accept ML's terms of service, and their privacy policy, but I was not willing to enter into any agreement of any sort with Facebook. If your understanding of Facebook and their privacy practices is unacceptable to you, you should be aware of this before you try to do business with MercadoLibre.
Since I had given MercadoLibre my email address, I received an email the following day explaining that the data they required were for the protection of all parties, ML, ML users, and myself. But there was no acknowledgment that a possibly toxic privacy policy was also required. see https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/Meta
[Company]'s response
Lawsuit
Consumer response
References