NEW YORK: Privacy groups have approached the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to put on hold Facebook's $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp and investigate how the social media giant plans to use subscriber data.

U.S.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Centre for Digital Democracy (CDD) asked the U.S. antitrust body to investigate WhatsApp and enjoin its “unfair and deceptive data collection practices” for any future changes to its privacy policy.

FTC looks into market practices that are anticompetitive, deceptive or unfair to consumers.

The groups claimed that Facebook “routinely makes use of user information for advertising purposes and has made clear that it intends to incorporate the data of WhatsApp users into the user profiling business model.”

“The proposed acquisition will therefore violate WhatsApp users’ understanding of their exposure to online advertising and constitutes an unfair and deceptive trade practice, subject to investigation by the FTC,” the bodies said.

Citing an example of Instagram, EPIC said its users were not subjected to advertisements based on the content they uploaded to the site before its acquisition by Facebook.

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