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

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.

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…

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

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

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

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…

Fuck the zuck

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

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

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.

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.

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.”

WhatsApp and meta have had a number of data breaches and accoint losses due to how the technology functions.

Signal is so secure that Defence use it. There’s articles of russia “hacking” singal but looking into them shows it’s only via social enginnnering to scan a QR code. Its so secure from accoint and data loss that signal literally can only give minimal evidence in court (compared to the Proton VPN stuff recently).

But TBH you might want to look into “How convince people of Y when they want X”. Your friends want vinilla and you want chocolate. Its not specifically about WhatsApp vs signal.

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