Bye-bye Whatsapp, hello Telegram
Facebook has been sued by European regulators for breaching our privacy, and it’s only going to get worse
I’m not a big believer in new year’s resolutions. But this year I have a goal: to move away from Whatsapp and use Telegram instead. As one of the largest messaging networks in the world, Whatsapp — with over 1.5-billion users — has become a convenient way to contact and communicate with just about anyone. But it is owned by Facebook, which has proved it is not able to store personal information without exploiting it, selling it, data-mining it. So why should I trust it with my personal messaging?
For a year I’ve resisted doing anything about it, because Whatsapp is the path of least resistance for messaging. Everyone is on it. It’s convenient. And it’s very good software, with some handy features, especially for group communication. It’s like smoking. Everyone knows it’s bad for you, but it took decades of lung cancer and other illnesses to finally convince the world that cigarettes are evil. Whatsapp is the cigarette of the internet. We have to give it up.
Why am I being so paranoid? Because Facebook has shown that it doesn’t hold our data sacred and it is willing to share it with its advertisers to ultimately monetise us.
Whatsapp’s remaining co-founder, Brian Acton, left Facebook last year — forgoing $850m in earnings — and immediately afterwards adverts began appearing in the Stories section.
Despite assurances that it wouldn’t combine phone numbers from Whatsapp, Facebook did that. Whatsapp was ordered by French privacy watchdog CNIL in December 2017 to stop sharing data with Facebook, while in 2016 German and UK regulators ordered Facebook to stop collecting Whatsapp data. In 2017 the European Commission fined Facebook €110m for “providing incorrect or misleading information” by claiming it was unable to delink Facebook and Whatsapp profiles when it could.
In December Facebook was sued by the attorney-general of the District of Columbia in the US for the Cambridge Analytica saga, and it’s unlikely there won’t be enormous consequences for its breaking of a 2011 agreement with regulator FTC to inform users of future data breaches.
A leopard can’t change its spots. Like a big cat predator, Facebook is at the top of the food chain, not just as the largest social network but in terms of advertising and communication reach. Late last year yet another damning New York Times exposé revealed how Facebook gave unbelievable access to the big tech firms to help grow the social network. “Facebook also allowed Spotify, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada to read, write and delete users’ private messages,” it reported, despite them saying they never asked for such access.
Walt Mossberg, the doyen of tech journalists, publicly abandoned Facebook “because my own values and the policies and actions of Facebook have diverged to the point where I’m no longer comfortable here”.
The two best alternatives to Whatsapp are Telegram and Signal. I’ll be writing about them next week.
Whatsapp’s owner, Facebook, is, like a big cat predator, unable to change its spots