I am slightly afraid that they are actually doing this so that it is harder to leave the platform. But phone privacy is a nice thing I suppose.
I wonder if it will affect how they ask for contracts permissions.
I doubt it will. Two years ago, WhatsApp introduced a new feature that allows users to save contacts directly into the app, in addition to collecting them from your address book.
That means if you use this feature and save all your contacts into WhatsApp directly, and then get a new phone where you download the app, they will automatically show you all your contacts by name, instead of just showing their phone number, because they have already been saved.
And of course, on top of that, they will still demand to access your address book, where you don’t just save phone numbers, but also email addresses, birthdays, social media handles, and all kinds of stuff.
I suspect they deliberately did all this before implementing usernames, so that they still get a ton of metadata from you.
I’m glad they have this feature, but when you consider the context and compare it to Signal, it’s clear that user privacy is not their priority.
Al Jazeera English made a video for those who prefer that.