I am a primarily Signal user. Most of my friends and family use Signal to get hold of me.
Now sometimes I need to make traditional calls to people, who do not have Signal or to businesses. For this I use VOIP.
I have a WhatsApp account on a separate number which I use for a select group of people. I don’t share access to my contacts for WhatsApp so finding someone is quite painful.
I consider that calling people over WhatsApp is better than using traditional phone lines. I also consider that there will always be someone uploading my phone number unknowingly to Facebook due to their unethical dark patterns.
Question becomes how should one approach this? Should you just not care and create WhatsApp on the same number, risking that people text you there instead of on Signal and Facebook knowing more about your connections.
Perhaps not quite the answer you were looking for but you can now ask meta to delete your fb/insta shadow profile and have your number/email blocked forever against re-upload by others: https://www.facebook.com/contacts/removal
I actually considered to add this to the post. Indeed a nice option, although it’s distinguishing this requires a user action. The numbers shouldn’t be uploaded in the first place…
Also with a few of my numbers and email addresses it didn’t work for a while and I had to wait a few days to try it again. Seems they impose some sort of limit in removing as well.
You are not alone, a phone number of my client is also getting issues again and I have just been told we haven’t been able to get through with their VOIP number either for a couple of days. When it works it’s rather seamless process but there are some blocks.
