| Finally a story I can say something to. Granted, the article isn't very informative, but to me it is a nicely written depiction of what happens when you drop WhatsApp. I can imagine the decision is not a dramatic one when living in a region in which WhatsApp is less used. Where I live however (central Europe), presenting the thought of not using WhatsApp purposely gives you weird stares. As the author states, there are no real alternatives. In theory, WhatsApp can be replaced by lots of other applications. I settled for Wire, as I would choose an application that makes use of the Signal protocol while also having an open source client + server over WhatsApp any time of the day. In practice, few want to even consider using something that is not WhatsApp. I managed to convince some close friends to install Wire alongside WhatsApp (can't have unencrypted SMS as my only communications channel), but it took some convincing and privacy aware ethics rambling (if that makes sense) to achieve that. I can't imagine any somewhat sane person wanting to bother with so much trouble when branching out to alternative solutions. This particular sentiment from the article especially couldn't ring any more true: "At the beginning, I often felt isolated and as if I had abandoned friends. Some contacts ebbed away, while I had to withstand the odd awkward look of disbelief and discontent from others when I explained that I did not use WhatsApp." I can understand the convenience gain by using WhatsApp over regular SMS. That convenience is hardly unparalled nowadays though, the one thing that keeps people chained to WhatsApp is it's ubiquity, in the sense that every person you meet will quite likely have WhatsApp installed (do note that I'm saying this as part of a somewhat younger demographic). I find this quite sad. My motivation for switching was simple, I didn't want to take part in any business Facebook sticks their fingers in. Whether Facebook uses all the metadata they get through WhatsApp, and for which (possibly nefarious) purposes is irrelevant, they've been shown to make unscrupulous use of data that should be private in order to conduct social experiments and whatnot a long time ago [1]. Am I in the wrong for trying to be mindful about the usage of my, very personal, data? I really hope I am not. First time poster here, sorry if this sort of anecdotal evidence doesn't fit the type of content that is usually posted on here. Also, what a funny way to send an article off. [1] http://veekaybee.github.io/2017/02/01/facebook-is-collecting... |