I use WhatsApp. Everyone in Latin America uses it. I don't believe that Zuckerberg is reading my chats, and not concerned enough about E2E encryption to bother evangelizing another app to everyone I know.
Is there a proof that there is no backdoor in WhatsApp? Client code is not released. By default it does unencrypted backup to cloud. You don't know if encryption keys are leaving device.
I don’t know if there’s proof, but I have a friend that works on the team that I trust. I’ve also seen the tools for analyzing the metadata for police warrants and they only deal with metadata (because content is encrypted).
For signal - phone numbers as IDs allow them to retain no other info on their servers. They don’t have your phone book (though if someone gets your device and forced you to unlock it that’s different, but then they’d have your contacts anyway). There’s a reasonable tradeoff here imo to retain as little as possible server side. Signal is also working on a non phone ID option iirc.
Same problem. I have multiple groups on WhatsApp that I don’t want to leave, but don’t believe they’ll migrate. Three family groups, close friends, school parents, son’s football club.
A lot of these people were the last to migrate to WhatsApp from email and SMS, and will now be the last to migrate away from it. And they’re a huge majority compared to the early adopter crowd we see on HN.
Have you tried a WhatsApp-bridge with element/matrix? You could use matrix internally while being available to clients via WA. I would strongly discourage any company to use meta-clients internally.
I'm having a bit of a... culture shock? Not sure how to call it. We're a small company from an eastern european country, building one product and trying to make it into the big world. We don't have the luxury of caring about if a messenger app is meta or not. Is it doing its job? yes. Is it encrypted? Sortof, but truth be told we'd use it anyways.
If we have extra time we spend it on checking backups, or improving performance, or researching new cool stuff we can add to our product. Which messenger app to use?! Yeah, definitely culture shock. Severe, too.