People regularly look at me like I’m from another planet when I say “I’m not on WhatsApp”. And I feel the need to explain myself. To save everyone from what is frankly quite a boring IRL conversation about privacy, surveillance, trust and data security, here’s a written consideration of the matter which you may read or ignore as you please.
Everyone is on WhatsApp, right? So why not me? Why give up all that convenience, connection and network-effect?
Trust in Facebook
I uninstalled Whatsapp and deleted the account after facebook bought whatsapp and changed the terms and conditions to allow facebook to slurp up whatsapp data and add it to their ever-growing stash.
Facebook (aka Meta) have previously shown that they can’t be trusted with your data by way of:
- use of a “localhost” data collection back-door on Android that completely disregard Android’s security measures,
- collection of phone call logs,
- and slurping up whatsapp data.
But everyone’s on it!
A common argument I get for “just using it” is that everyone is on it, it’s convenient and basically I’m cutting myself off from social connections. YEAH I KNOW, I’m not happy about it, but in the end I can’t make my entire network of connections move to Signal or equivalent, so my only choice is to carry on feeding data and trusting the platform or give up on it all.
I did try having a WhatsApp account without the app on my phone and just using WhatsApp Web or keeping it on a secondary smart phone in a drawer somewhere for those people who don’t have Signal/Telegram, but unfortunately then everyone sees an active WhatsApp account on my phone number and uses it to send me messages I don’t see and then wonder why I’m ignoring them.
Disappearing messages
The disjoint between ephemeral IRL conversations where you can say any stupid thing you’ll regret but it’s gone the moment you say it and WhatsApp chat logs where you can say any stupid thing and it’ll live for 10 years or more in your chat logs waiting to bite you hard when you’re a different person has bothered me for years.
When I dropped WhatsApp there was no capability to limit the history. They have since added disappearing WhatsApp messages/chats to WhatsApp (assuming you trust them to actually leave no trace).
End-to-end encryption
But it’s “end-to-end encrypted” so that means it’s totally private and secure… right? Just by chain of logical thinking there is nothing to stop these companies silently breaking the end-to-end encryption for individual users but leaving the user unaware.
With the closed-source nature of these apps it is impossible to inspect the application and verify that it doesn’t have back-doors, bypasses, kill-switches, and in the end you have to trust the organisation providing you software. Even if it was open source, the regular “security and convenience” updates that you can’t opt out of (because securité) means they could theoretically push out a back-doored app just for you on your phone any time they like.
I have no evidence (obviously), but just by chain of logic, if the government is the ultimate authority in our democracies, and we the people actually want them to use whatever power is available to them to stop the “bad guys”, it makes logic sense that the law-abiding tech companies will largely do whatever the authorities say, including introducing back-doors and surveillance capabilities? I have no evidence, but the incentives make it highly likely, and of course they would have a “gag” in place so the tech companies could never reveal it otherwise it would ruin the whole game.
“Governments have long argued that E2E encryption is hampering the investigation of serious crimes, at least on a larger scale.”
Not to mention, even end to end encryption is no good if you accidentally add the wrong person to the chat or your phone gets malware’d. The malware would affect any app including Signal, so that’s really only a warning to turn on disappearing messages and keep your phone secure if you can.
“Nothing to hide”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not doing this because I have anything particularly sensitive in my chat logs, I’m not a hacker, ethical or otherwise, I’m not a journalist, and I’m not any number of other things that might make you need to really hide stuff. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be sensible with your data. We all say things we wish we hadn’t at times, even if it’s not something that’s going to get the authorities interested.
“The ‘nothing to hide’ argument is a logical fallacy which states that individuals have no reason to fear or oppose surveillance programs unless they are afraid it will uncover their own illicit activities”
One day you’re law abiding, and the next day they change the laws. See the famous “First they came…”, and more recently some troubling goings on with ICE in the USA.
Alternatives
- Signal - allegedly very secure. Not quite as nice to use.
- Telegram - possibly not any better, but it’s not owned by Facebook and I really like the UX
- SMS - lowest common denominator. Sucks, know to be surveilled, but sometimes people I message are nothing but WhatsApp
- iMessage - Apple’s walled garden. Meh. I don’t like Android, I like iPhones even less.
- Rich Communication Services (RCS) protocol
References
- Forbes: “Facebook As The Ultimate Government Surveillance Tool?”
- EFF: “When Platforms and the Government Unite, Remember What’s Private and What Isn’t”
- ACLU: “Is the Government Tracking Your Social Media Activity?”
- BBC: “Google and Facebook can be legally intercepted, says UK spy boss”
- The Verge: How the FBI built its own smartphone company to hack the criminal underworld
- LifeHacker: Signal Is Private, Sure, but Not That Private
- BBC: UK demands access to Apple users’ encrypted data - Feb 2025
- LifeHacker: “This Spyware Warning From Apple Is Actually Real”
Light relief through satire
Man that was depressing/heavy/boring.
Let’s lighten up and finish with some amusing satire on facebook data collection from The Onion:
via Snopes: “Is Facebook a CIA Surveillance Program?” (i.e. People don’t realize The Onion is satirical)