I have been pro privacy and anti data harvesting for many years now, however it is becoming increasingly more difficult staying off some platforms. Mostly Meta.
Over the years I have convinced most of my friends and family to use Signal instead of WhatsApp. However, there are still chat groups that I am missing from, and trying to keep up to date with local events seems next to impossible without Facebook or Instagram.
Additionally, I am finding it more and more tiring to have the awkward “No I don’t have WhatsApp. No I don’t have Facebook either. Or Instagram, sorry. Do you want to try an app that you’ve never heard of to stay in contact with me?” every time I meet someone new.
I saddens me that it feels like the multi-billion dollar data harvesting companies are winning, but I no longer know if this is a hill that I’m willing to die on.
What are your thoughts on what we have to give up in our lives just to stay in control of our personal information?
The cost of extreme privacy is your mental health and human relations. As rough as it sounds, you have to make a compromise, because you will not be an Edward Snowden in your life. What you can be, however, is an individual with a private life that beats out 95% people at having better privacy.
While I do not want to recommend it for privacy reasons, having just WhatsApp is good enough to strike that balance, to keep that one outlet open to society. I ended up doing that, since I realised barely a few people came to install Signal for me, even though I have a lot of leverage. They would instantly prefer normal calls and SMS over the usual WhatsApp, which is way worse for message content privacy and security. I did that experiment announcing reducing and even stopping WhatsApp usage, firewalling it and opening it weekly to check messages, and did gain a lot of leverage, but life became harder and stressed.
If you feel like you want to talk more, you can, whenever I will get time online. I can help you with threat modelling.
I would not consider whatsapp any better, maybe even worse than normal calls/sms, because it has been shown that it is compromised.
https://securityaffairs.com/125176/security/encrypted-messaging-apps-data-access.html
You need to read the article yourself first. If you looked at the main content closely,
you will notice a WhatsApp section where it says “Messages: Limited*”, referring to unencrypted iCloud backups giving away messages which is no mystery. This is not an Android problem, and even better if chats are locally backed up on Android.
WhatsApp message content for one-to-one chats has not been compromised to date as far as E2EE goes, whereas metadata is unencrypted. WhatsApp messages atleast on Android can only be accessed in two ways — either user reports the other user to end up sharing the last few contextual messages between both parties, or by (forcefully) opening the phone. There is a third way, Israel/USA tools like Pegasus malware and Cellebrite toolkits, but those are reserved for high profile targets like activists and politicians.
you assume the application itself isn’t compromised.
Brainrot conspiracy theories are baseless when we have examples of court subpoenas and sophisticated malware like Pegasus needed to open phone and get to WhatsApp messages. Metadata is far more valuable compared to message content for feds, which is what stupid people are yet to realise. The same people that believe in this conspiracy theory and then go on to use Chromium based browsers leaking every bit of metadata possible, and using PWA apps without a firewall and good HOSTS ruleset are laughable.