According to The Verge, WhatsApp won’t require users to directly link their Facebook account to the chat app in order to port their Status to their Story. Instead, the transfer is made via the data-sharing API used by iOS and Android. While the content will be shared across apps on a person’s device, the accounts won’t be linked. There is also no option to automatically share a Status to another platform — users will have to actively choose to share it. Engadget has reached out to Facebook for additional information and will update this story if we hear back.

Creating a direct link between WhatsApp and Facebook has been a sensitive subject, as the social networking giant promised it wouldn’t start collecting data from the messaging service when it acquired it back in 2014. Then it started doing exactly that just two years later. European countries have frowned upon the company’s data sharing practices, with the European Commission fining Facebook for misleading regulators during its acquisition of WhatsApp.