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.