Hello, I’m new to this forum and new to privacy in general. I am looking for some guidance in how to create a whatsapp account anonymously. I want to use the service to contact people without giving out my personal information.
WhatsApp needs your phone number in order to work. If you’re concerned about giving out your contact to the people you chat with you can use the username instead of the phone number.
VPN+phone verification service and minimal permissions is as good as I can think of. Maybe Burner phone only for WhatsApp that you acquire anonymously and don’t use near any location known to you.
I thought Whatsapp does not have a feature to hide your phone number? Isn’t your phone number always visible in one-on-one chats? Also if you could help me with my other question I posted that would be much appreciated. I need to know how to purchase a non-voip sms service without using my credit card.
it’s not possible.
But you may mitigated some of the invasive aspect. When you install whatsapp, it will ask to acess all your contact. You cannot manually add thoses you want. So you would have a minimum to use a separate android profil (or phone) and not use your main phone number.
You can refuse WhatsApp perms to access your contacts though? I’m not using WhatsApp to contact people on my personal phone/phone number’s contacts. All I want to use WhatsApp without it having a link to me and my personal information from bad actors looking to seek that out.
It’s a recent feature.
You must be aware that Whatsapp still needs your phone number in order to work and the people that knows your number could still find and contact you on Whatsapp.
The username is useful when you want to avoid giving your number to new people and still be able to contact them. In this case your number is not visible in the one-on-one chat.
It is not useful if you’re trying to avoid giving your personal number to Meta.
You probably also want to enable the Strict account user setting.
Can’t help with that, sorry.
You could try getting a number from wantsms, use a vpn, and pay with crypto. If you want to use xmr, just reach out to their support and they should be able to help.
Easier to obtain a prepaid SIM with cash to use with burner phone than to navigate the online services.
Of course if you live in KYC prepaid country you’ll have to travel.
Finally, note that WhatsApp can still tell who you are based on your IP so you’ll have to sandbox the WhatsApp client to a VM or similar that forces traffic through VPN or Tor. QubesOS is excellent for isolating software into such containers as you can configure at this level with GUI tools alone, just set VMs network VM (each VM is called a qube) into whonix and you’re done.
Also consider that WhatsApp has your comms metadata. Meaning suppose there’s a group whos had the same members Alice Bob Charlie and David for a decade. Youre David here.
One day David leaves, and a week later a new member joins the group. They’re behind Tor and phone number is different. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell who that anonymous user is, the server knows who is in each group.
On android, I try about 2 month ago on a friend phone, and it did not work.
If we refused tu full access to his contacts, the application setup failed.
So, if you have a pixel, you could install inside the private space as a workarround.
Signal which is suggested to use, does not show your number to others in a group chat. unless someone in the group chat does have your number only they would see it. Signal also does have usernames which has been a thing for quite some time. they are working on some ability to sign up without a phone number.
This is not true for me. It’s more convenient to shop online.
True.
And if you have GrapheneOS, you can put WhatsApp in a separate profile or private space and a different VPN or Tor. GrapheneOS is not designed for anonymity and apps can detect they are on the same phone cross profile(even websites might be able to as a matter of fact). But even though they can identify one device that doesn’t hand them your identity. You’re more pseudonymous than anonymous. Apps can see the exact date of one setup/factory reset among many other things so it’s clear anonymity is not going to be easy on Android based devices.
On GrapheneOS, the only permission you need to grant WhatsApp is Network for it to work for texting and signing up. You must grant phone permission if your want to call, which gives WhatsApp access to your real phone number among other phone related things.
They say they need it in order to make sure no other calls are happening but it’s bullshit because Signal doesn’t need it. Not sure if they’re doing it to grab your real pine number or they are just bad developers. Doesn’t really matter.
GrapheneOS had talked about adding “Phone scopes” like contact scopes and storage scores but it hasn’t been added yet and you only need to use it when using a hostile app like WhatsApp.
Is running a VPN on your phone while using WhatsApp not enough? I am not familiar with the use of virtual machines or linux as I am a beginner.
Do you mind providing me with some resources on how to set up a wallet with xmr. I am a complete beginner to crypto.
If the VPN app can be configured to prevent WhatsApp’s connection to internet unless the VPN is on, then sure.
A single mistake is enough to reveal the IP address for good.
The phone chat clients tend to not have internal proxy settings so you could ask it to only connect through your VPN, and with the VMs you can force the behavior so it greatly reduces the risk that something goes wrong.
Here’s a video tutorial of using CakeWallet and GrapheneOS. You can skip the GrapheneOS part or just enjoy it. You install CakeWallet from Google Play, the Apple App Store, or Accrescent/GitHub. Any of those is fine.
Here’s a book to understand Monero just read the first few chapters. https://masteringmonero.com/book/Mastering%20Monero%20First%20Edition%20by%20SerHack%20and%20Monero%20Community.pdf
Once you’ve made a wallet, reply here and I’ll send you some XMR to play around with.
You can make a more private WhatsApp account, but not a truly anonymous one. WhatsApp still requires a valid phone number for registration, and the phone carrier/WhatsApp may be able to associate that number with you.
For better privacy, I use a separate SIM or eSIM that I don’t use for personal contacts, register WhatsApp with that number, and use a non-identifying profile name/photo.
If you’re completely new to crypto, I’d recommend starting with the official Monero documentation and taking it slowly. The Monero community has beginner-friendly guides covering wallet options, setup, backups, and basic security. Avoid downloading wallets from random links, and make sure you securely back up your seed phrase—never share it with anyone.
The minimum settings for messages, I think with contacts; is to set contacts to OFF and storage scope to (empty storage location) - particularly easy to do in a separate profile in GOS. You really only need network permission on; and camera, mic and phone for calls.
@Expert4870 I was not aware that apps could reach each other cross-profile. That is not my understanding of how the profile walled garden works, particularly since OFF/CLOSED profiles are in a BFU state. It would also imply to me that the Sandbox is not sufficiently working in GOS, which, they certainly have never claimed. I am aware there is some inter-app communication within profile, but that is between apps specifically coded (i.e. Google suite with each other). Could you provide more information/link some resources. I may not be fully aware of this.
I don’t think they can.
Is there a sandbox between profiles? I know there’s one between apps. I don’t know much about it.
This is not an exploit, they are likely sending all the fingerprinting data the can get from your device to their servers and analyzing it.
The fingerprint.com app and website provide this demo.
The fingerprint pro app and website and my testing with it is the basis of this claim. It seems you could even just get a highly reliable fingerprint by using the single data point about factory reset/set up date.