[pyjammas]

I've been curious about what the effects are of people moving to Instagram and WhatsApp.

I'm not too familiar with the former, but am I correct in assuming it's less useful, compared to FB proper, for both ads and information gathering?

And with WhatsApp, if everything is indeed end-to-end encrypted, would this not be even more the case? Instead of a steady supply of chats, photos, location data, FB would 'only' have metadata to work with. And ads are probably not really a realistic option at all.

Unless I'm wrong about all that, I imagine the value of these two platforms is significantly lower than the original value of Facebook (to them, anyways)

[gnode]

In Instagram's case, it's trivial to profile people by what they follow, and the platform has become heavily laden with ads. It was too much for me to bear, and the main reason I left it.

Also, I don't know about global statistics, but in the UK amongst adults, adblocker usage is around 22%. Delivering ads to these people becomes far easier in smartphone apps.

[deepbreath]

The WhatsApp client could still learn your interests from your conversations and request ads related to them from the server.

[pyjammas]

Isn't all that end-to-end encrypted?

[deepbreath]

It is, but your own client obviously has access to the conversation (how else would it display it on your screen?). So learning your interests can be done on the client-side, rather than server-side. Then your list of interests is reported to the server.