Thank you ever so much for your help. I guess and hope that we play the long game. With signal and RCS slowly but surly growing. It’s better that Signal and RCS gets as good as WhatsApp so that when new comes try it out they are impressed and feel it is better than WhatsApp.
WhatsApp was growing my tens of millions of subscribers around the world. It was becoming the default messaging app for everyone. Facebook saw it was a thread, which is why they bought. And this is why we need to break Meta up.
That being said, I am confident that had Meta not bought WhatsApp, another Big Tech company would have bought it. Probably Google. I wonder what would have happened if Yahoo had bought it? Since they turn every popular app into dust (eg: Flickr & Tumblr), they probably would have fumbled WhatsApp too.
Even if WhatsApp refused to be bought and stood alone as a company, I doubt it would have been a beacon of privacy. Because most of the current popular stand-alone apps are very much into surveillance capitalism at worst, and at best they don’t implement any privacy features like E2EE.
As someone suggested to me in on Tech Lore, if I am forced to use WhatsApp for work, which I am, I change my profile picture to Signal’s logo, and I write in my bio Text Me on Signal. Also, for friends and family, follow Michael Bazzell’s advice by deliberately responding slowly on WhatsApp and faster on Signal. That said, I find that results heavily depend on the social currency you have with your peers. So if you generally have low currency, work on that.
Furthermore, I would set all my WhatsApp messages to self-destruct within 90 days. I have never tested self-destroying messages in a group chat, so I don’t know how it works when you enable it.
Does it only delete the messages for you or also for others?
Does it delete everyone’s messages, or just yours?
No idea.
It’s technically not a lie. Unfortunately, too many people in the privacy community use the terms encryption and end-to-end encryption (E2EE) interchangeably, which is annoying.
Many privacy companies, including Proton, use the simple term encryption in marketing when they mean E2EE. I don’t think Proton does that by mistake. I tihnk they do it because for the layperson, the word encryption connotes E2EE even though they can’t tell the difference between the two.
On the flip side, I think malevolent companies like Meta use the terms encryption and E2EE to deceive their users and the media. Unfortunately it works. I will never understand why both Proton & Tuta continue to include Telegram on their list of recommended messaging apps. Even if it’s at the bottom, it’s unacceptable. They know better, and hence, should do better.
I don’t think it’s a simple as that. As someone who is deeply invested in other issues unrelated to privacy, I can tell you that facts alone are not enough to compel people to change. And it’s not just about moving with the times or being old. I know a lot of young people who are unmmovable on other issues, even if they can recognize that the facts are against them. I would even go further by speculating that we probably all fall into that category for some issues.
All this is to say, persuading people to use better privacy tools is hard. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. Even if we fail.
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Quote possible yahoo would have, but then at least more people would use Signal. If google brought it, the likely similar or been integrated into the text messages app, and we would have had Google messages a lot earlier. Or may have been like Signal a lot earlier.