I don't recall this potential bombshell (maybe because it was shortly before a Christmas, and the NYT headline looked like just more of the same ol'):
> And in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn't use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents," reported that Facebook "gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages."
For better or worse, I found that the people willing to keep Signal installed and up to date largely just to get in touch with me was a good proxy for the list of people that really matter most to me.
I didn't win many over on the importance of privacy or Signal, but the willingness of some to put up with it because it matters to me says a lot about my relationship with them.
Complete E2E encryption, only you and the person that you're talking to can read the messages. Yes, having you be identified by phone number is not great but they introduced usernames recently.
Who cares if it was for ads, giving third party companies access should be a huge problem with or without ads.