[hornokpleas]

In the Whatsapp group, you don't have to share anything about yourself or your child that you don't want to. The daycare might only post very generic info about opening times, events, etc, or it might be one used only for parents to communicate among themselves, at their option.

Facebook know who is in the group and what they post but none of it is necessarily confidential information.

On the other hand, the daycare as part of their operations know lots of details of your children's development, health issues, allergies, mental health, educational attainment and special needs. They know if you are getting divorced, who has custody, if there are dangerous people in the child's life and so on.

Is keeping this private really in the same ballpark as choosing to have a WA group or not?

[PennRobotics]

The fact that the bar for data privacy should be very high for the daycare shouldn't diminish the need for data privacy in the daycare-recommended parent group.

I've broken contact with a reasonably tech-savvy part of my family. I have to decide between being informed about current events and hoping the next Meta leak doesn't have my full name, number, hometown, and possibly group memberships.

[hornokpleas]

Most people are not like you.

[rakoo]

Let's turn your question on its head: if using an application fighting to keep users' privacy as high as possible, such as Signal, just as easy as using Whatsapp, why use the latter ?

[hornokpleas]

The premise of your question is obviously flawed: it is not as easy. The precise reason why WA is used is that it's easier, because vastly more people already have it installed.

But anyway, it's just not a priority for a daycare.

Guaranteeing that for example staff don't respond to enquiries about children's health unless it's from the parents is a priority.