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.

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

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.

I would just make a signal account and let them know they can add you. Maybe get them in one by one.

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.

I’ve been down this path. Getting people to switch was a mixed bag. Some did and have stuck around using it. But others either refused (“another messaging app?!”) or wanted to but ran into problems using Signal.

I’ve also run into problems connecting with people on Signal. They just aren’t findable, even with their privacy settings relaxed and with me trying several formats of their number. After troubleshooting and having other people try, it seems random and makes no sense.

So the three biggest downsides of Signal are: a) users having to juggle yet another messaging app (because their friends/family are scattered across several and they find this overwhelming already); b) Signal looking a bit ‘ugly’ of not as useable to some people; c) people getting frustrated at not being able to connect with friends who are already on there.

The biggest upsides to Signal are a) it’s not Meta or some other corporation trying to profit from exploring its users; b) it’s a clean and simple UX (IMO) that doesn’t try to do too much extra; c) the organization behind it takes security very seriously.

[>]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

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

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.

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