[hairofadog]

WhatsApp claims to be private and secure, but they insist on slurping up your entire address book before they'll let you use the app (or to be more specific, you can't do things like name a contact or start a group chat without allowing them to upload your entire address book).

Is that data encrypted in such a way that Meta can't sell or make the data available to third-parties who might use it in nefarious ways? Or do they deposit that data directly into their bank account?

I'm in the US, but the owner of the company I work for lives in Europe and refuses to use anything other than WhatsApp to communicate, so it's a tremendous pain in the ass. I wish Apple had the concept of multiple address books so I could choose a limited or even fake dataset to hand over in cases like this.

[sgjohnson]

No. It’s because the metadata is enough for the 3 letter agencies. They are pefectly happy knowing who’s in your contacts, who and when are you texting, and who’s in the contact book of your counterparty without knowing exactly what are you talking about.

[codethief]

> I'm in the US, but the owner of the company I work for lives in Europe and refuses to use anything other than WhatsApp to communicate

I feel your pain. It doesn't even make that much sense anymore: So many people in Europe have Signal these days…

[kibwen]

If a company wants to dictate the software that its employees use, then it's the company's moral responsibility to provide hardware to run that software on. Not a chance in hell that I'm installing random spyware on my personal machines just to send an IM to my boss.

[cl3misch]

I also feel your pain. In your specific case, you could not allow Whatsapp access to your contacts, and still use it with your employer? Of course, that does not prevent your colleagues from uploading their contacts...

[hairofadog]

Yeah, this is what I do. I mean I know my data is being collected all over the place through other people clicking “yes, take all my data” on this and many other services and apps, but I still don’t like doing it to other people.

So what this means is that when the owner starts a group chat and adds people I haven’t chatted with in WhatsApp before, those third parties show up as just numbers, and I can’t label them even once I learn who they are.

Also, if the owner says “let’s hop on WhatsApp; start a chat and invite (other co-worker)” I have to say that I can’t start group calls, and explaining why gets a lot of eye rolling. And maybe the eye rolling is justified? Trying to maintain privacy is tiring, and I’m probably accomplishing exactly nothing by refusing to let WhatsApp have my address book. They can probably tell me what’s in it with 95% accuracy already, so it does feel a bit like making a stand to prove a point, except literally nobody cares. It would be like if I had a mustache and chose sustainably-produced mustache wax instead of the regular kind, and it turns out the sustainable-mustache-wax company is a subsidiary of Nestle anyway; that’s about the level of impact I’m having here by refusing to press certain buttons inside WhatsApp.