I am trying to convince my group to switch from WhatsApp to Signal and we plan to vote on it soon. So, I plan to use the replies in this thread to compile a list of reasons to use as talking points. Preferably, 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.
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…
…how do you know?
Matrix remains my favorite. Warts and all.
Delta chat for me
Fuck the zuck
Shitbook knowingly contributed to the genocide against the Rohingas in Myanmar. I want nothing to do with a company that is this evil.
Meta. But perhaps an additional and entirely petty reason: It’s a terrible pun.
I never processed that it was a pun. Goddamn it’s terrible
It’s a…? Oh. Ew.
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.
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.”
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.
Meta
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.
This is the correct answer.
I just wish I could have expressed my complex opinions more eloquently.
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.
and recently they figured out how to use the OS’s notification database to collect some cache and read the notifications Signal sends
On one OS. You can tune Signal not to display the notification contents. Moreover, if you’re on iOS and actually expect privacy, you should probably reflect on your choices a little more.
Realistically iOS is more private than base android at this point
They pulled the Signal messages from an iPhone… https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2026/04/10/fbi-pulled-deleted-signal-messages-from-an-iphone-without-breaking-encryption/
… Because the person had message previews in notifs turned on
But not Graphene. I’ve yet to hear about this exploit on Android. Curious if it holds true.
Definitely
fortunately, most OSs now offer granular enough notification controls so they can be set to just notify users when messages are received and nothing more.
Everything by meta is spyware.
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.
