Ask Lemmy

One is owned by a US tech corp whose primary income stream is building advertising profiles on users and selling advertising space to businesses while handing data off to authoritarian governments without warrants.

The other is a US non profit where the FBI admitted the only data they can get from them is when the user registered and when they were last online.

You might think you don't have anything to hide right now and you're fine with a corporation collecting your data. However, you never know when something that is inextricable from your persona might be made illegal and you'd be prosecuted based on the metadata openly available through your messaging platform.

It's what happened to Jews in Germany

Everything by meta is spyware.

Signal is nonprofit

Whatsapp = Facebook (Meta)

thats everything you need to know about the striking differences of the two. One actually tries to respect your privacy while the other is exploiting you for using its product

Fuck the zuck

I hate facebook and it's lizard CEO. Also Signal is open source and private.

What's app is Facebook, what other argument do you need? Unless this you retirement home group chat how the fuck is anyone under 50 still using Facebook.

They are not comparable in my view. One is owned by Facebook, known for MITMing smartphones via a VPN app and successfully intercepting and decrypting traffic from competing apps.

The other is widely regarded to be the best option for most people and most uses cases for privacy and security.

All the reasons the good folks have set out here are great.

I tell my employee: if you don't have a secure line of communication already installed when you need it, it's too late. Ask me how I know....

Meta

Shitbook knowingly contributed to the genocide against the Rohingas in Myanmar. I want nothing to do with a company that is this evil.

The sole fact that it's open source should be enough to convince anyone, but assuming your family isn't familiar with the concept you'd have to explain it to them. It can turn into a big conversation pretty quickly. The way I've done it (with a close friend group) is with the help of a friend, a respected member of this group who happens to be a developer and militant, so we were two people telling everybody that we need to switch, one of which essentially considered an authority in the matter. If I were you I'd try to find that second person. In numbers, you need fewer arguments to convince people.

It doesn't spam your phone with photos, unless you decide to download them

It doesn't backup your conversations to your already nearly full, Google owned Drive

Dark mode by default

Not owned by Meta

No frills, I couldn't care less for "personal stories" or whatever bs Whatsapp has

Basically it is somewhat more respectful of your agency as a user.

...edit: yes you have a setting to toggle backup off. And to change background to whatever you want. And I'm sorry for you, because your deeply cynical friends (your words) probably won't care about my points either. Because in essence, all my reasons rest on personal values. Which your friends already don't care about, else they would be complaining about things such as no space on phone or being annoyed at having to change settings for things they don't want or need.

I use signal but never managed to get rid of WhatsApp. It's a default app nowadays and most people use it. I constantly deal with random customers and whatnot through it. Only family is on signal. Which is sort of nice, I see a signal notification and know it's someone important.

Zucc at the time. That they're American at all now.

Meta. But perhaps an additional and entirely petty reason: It's a terrible pun.

Meta and everything they do and stand for is why I chose Signal over Whatsapp.

Signal does everything Whatsapp does and it aligns with my personal values:

1. I can support a healthy, competitive market by keeping alternatives alive - lack of competition is the death of innovation. Entshittification is only possible because there isn't enough competition.

2. I help shield people who really need privacy (like journalists and whistle-blowers) by adding to the crowd for them to disappear in. I think of it a little as getting vaccinated - the chances are extremely low that I'll ever really need privacy protection but I do it anyway, to protect the "at-risk" population, and to keep options alive in case my situation ever changes.

3. Privacy is not about having something to hide but about the right to consent. I don't need anonymity, I have nothing to hide. However there are still some things that I don't want some random Meta employee to know about me, or photos that are for my husband only. Signal allows me to choose what I share and with whom.

Edit: a word

WhatsApp is a product of Meta, one of the most outright evil organisations in the world. Signal isn't - the Signal Foundation isn't perfect, but they do at least try to do right by their users.

In favour of whatsapp:

• You've already got it installed

Against whatsapp:

• It's one of those tech platforms owned by and run for the benefit of evil billionaires
• The source code isn't available, so nobody really knows if it's secure at all
• The metadata probably all just quietly flows into the Facebook data maelstrom
• It never worked properly on my android phone that doesn't have Google services
• It differs from Signal only in ways that make it worse

I just don't want to support big corporations anymore. I moved some of my chats to signal with some really nice people but most of my chats and work are still on whatsapp..

Plenty of report out there that even if WhatsApp is e2e meta is harvesting as much info as it can from it. Signal has proven to store as minimal as possible.

Separate from privacy, on WhatsApp I regularly got messages by spam accounts. Not daily, but pretty close. Have never gotten a spam message on signal

It's simply trust in the organization that maintains the app.

Unless you're coordination/organizing about legal grey or red areas then it's not much danger. Meta says it's E2E but do they really not have access to your data? I don't believe them. Any data they have would be happily handed over to the authorities just like your protonmail.

Signal just straight up doesn't have access since it's all stored at the endpoint and they provide no remote backup.

If your WhatsApp loving friends need some convincing is switch to Signal I would tell them:

• Signal is more private than WhatsApp.
• Signal has a "stories" feature similar to Instagram or Snapchat... I think, I don't use that sort of thing. They added it in the last few years and I've been wanting to try it but like you my friend group is mostly elsewhere apart from a growing few who have had enough of Meta's BS. The Europeans and South Americans I know are extra embedded in WhatsApp because SMS stopped being used there much earlier than in the US.
• Nearly no spam! I can't recall having ever received spam on Signal. WhatsApp is full of it.
• Signal is a simpler app. If you have anyone older, anyone handicapped, anyone with a traumatic brain injury, etc. in your friend group, Signal is much more sensical and easy to use. WhatsApp is cluttered and has some baked in AI slop.
• Built in scheduled sends. You can press and hold the send button and choose when your message will go out. This is great for a night owl like me who doesn't get around to answering until everyone is asleep and also doesn't want to wake anyone up.

Hope this helps, and let us know how it goes,many of us are trying to do the same thing. How big is your group? Can we help you make a slideshow presentation? :D

I am unconvinced that Zuckerberg isn't personally searching Meta messages to select future Epstein Island 2.0 victims.

I've had friends who had close calls with what seemed to them to be a kidnapping attempt by a paid organized group of people.

I dismissed their experience.

Then the Epstein files released.

Tinfoil hat incoming:

Zuckerberg's whole organization makes a hell of a lot more sense if their real product is profiles allowing billionaires to select their next rape victims.

I don't think there's anything on a personal level that you can give them. I personally have accepted that I won't convince people to switch so I use WhatsApp. That being said, up until very recently you could use the "hidden in the crowd" excuse, e.g. there's no way for them to monitor every single thing that goes through them effectively, this has changed with the advance of LLMs.

This might not concern them, but the truth is that nothing you do in WhatsApp is private, the fact that you can read the same messages on two different devices at the same time without having had to input any sort of password is a dead giveaway that the information is stored unencrypted in the servers. This means that every message someone has ever sent on WhatsApp is likely stored on a huge database that can be scrapped by LLMs to find out information on an unprecedented level. Finding every user who has broken the law by for example mentioned using weed or illegally downloading content or finding all of the password for all of the accounts people have sent over Whatsapp is as easy as asking it in English. And the question you gotta ask yourself is "Do you trust Meta not to abuse that power? Do you trust every single employee at Meta with access to this database not to scrape it for personal gains?".

But realistically that would fall on deaf ears. If you truly are serious about this you should flip the script, e.g. "Signal can do everything that WhatsApp can, AND it's secure, which is important to me even if not to you. If you decide to use WhatsApp you're saying that my opinion doesn't matter, because you have no argument other than inertia. It's like if a friend of yours developed an allergy to shrimps and you decide to still keep meeting in a Bubba Shrimp restaurant weekly because that's what you've been doing."

Same thing that made me choose WhatsApp, people are there. We need to force companies to allow for open messenger standards now

[>]I need something that can be understood on a personal level as some of my friends are deeply cynical and have no concern about escaping techno-feudalism and surveillance

[>]every comment is about privacy or evil business guys