How much worse is it privacy wise for me to give them access to my contacts?
No. Meta is a data harvesting company. Any points of data you give them is bad, privacy-wise.
And don’t believe the claptrap that WhatsApp is “safe” from prying eyes or truly E2EE. Meta is not and has never been trustworthy, and they have been caught lying on countless occasions.
Use their products at your own peril.
but everyone I know uses them and no, they’re not switching to signal…
Not with that attitude (like, unironically speaking, you have to be more insistent)
they just said no, I respect that
EVERYONE IN MY COUNTRY USES WHATSAPP, YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT WA HERE YK…
EVERYONE IN MY COUNTRY USES WHATSAPP, YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT WA HERE YK…
Same thing probably could have been said about my country (Germany) 10 years ago, and look where we’re at now.
I spontaneously deleted my WhatsApp account a few years ago and haven’t regretted it once. When people suddenly can’t contact you through WhatsApp anymore, they can still use SMS (which is horrible as well but still better than any services by Meta) or hopefully give in at some point and also use Signal.
Also, do those friends of yours know that you don’t have to immediately abandon WhatsApp to use Signal? Both can be used simultaneously, like many of my family and relatives do, and I see almost no logical reason to refuse that.
BRO SMS AIN’T BETTER THAN WHATSAPP IT HAS NO ENCRYPTION, PURE FANBOYISM
They just don’t want another chat app on their phone, they just use wa for almost everything
It’s not “fanboyism”, I already wrote that SMS is horrible. And what makes you so sure that WhatsApp really is really properly encrypted and not doing some shenanigans? Proprietary apps can claim all kinds of things. So call me naive, but I’ll take minimal non-sensitive unencrypted SMS through a somewhat trustworthy service provider over basically spyware on my phone any day, although that may of course be because I live somewhere with relatively decent data protection laws (not that one should put too much trust in those either, but eh, still better than trusting fucking Meta imho).
People install all kinds of crap on their phones, but a single more private messenger is suddenly too much to ask for? Some people really are beyond saving… Though I can kinda relate, my brother is just as stubborn. Any way, I’d still advise to just quit WA and tell them you’ll only communicate through Signal (or SimpleX, Session, etc.) in the future, which should help as an incentive. If you’re willing to do that is of course up to yo
Open source doesn’t mean it’s secure and closed source doesn’t mean it’s not secure. Also, if it wasn’t e2e encrypted, we would find out pretty much instantly since there are a lot of people who reverse engineering apps like WhatsApp, since zero-day exploits cost a lot of money, you know. So, personally, I would be pretty sure that WhatsApp is absolutely end-to-end encrypted.
Also, how is it a good idea to give a signal my contacts if it’s not okay to give meta my contacts?
Also, if you don’t accept this argument, then how do you know there’s not a component in your phone that listens to everything you say that’s above system level?..
Well, then y’all can enjoy your loss of privacy. I’m not telling you what to do, but that is the consequence of using their products.
You need to ask your contacts if that’s ok. Not us.
what about signal?
bro pretty much all of them use WhatsApp, let’s be real
are the terms that you accept when using WhatsApp real enough for you?
You provide us, in accordance with applicable laws, the phone numbers in your mobile address book on a regular basis, including those of both the users of our Services and your other contacts. You confirm you are authorized to provide us such numbers to allow us to provide our Services.
what about signal…
well most ppl in the EU use WhatsApp and give wa access to their contacts…
Yeah, here in Germany, we’ve had a verdict that you need to get written permission from all your contacts, if you give WhatsApp access to their data: https://www.rv.hessenrecht.hessen.de/bshe/document/LARE190000029
I would assume, the same is true in the entire EU.
what about signal, is that illegal aswell?
I don’t know, if they collect contact information or how it’s processed, so no idea…
yet ur ok with giving them ur contacts, bht with wa ur not
what about signal, is that illegal aswell?
I’ve been refusing to give them permission for about 5 years now, and the only ill effect I’ve really had is not having a name associated with the contact when texting them
yeah, how do you keep track of their names?
yeah, how do you keep track of their names?
Personally I wouldn’t give Facebook and Meta access to the list of people I know with their names, phone numbers, and some addresses.
what if I need to use it?
Then use it? You don’t have to give it your contacts.
gl keeping track of all the phone numbers…
Can you have separate WhatsApp contacts to your phone contacts? Maybe copy them manually to WhatsApp if needed?
u can’t do that without giving it permission to all contacts
I use Launch Chat for the occasional use. You can paste the number there and press a button to open whatsapp dms for given number. Been using it for a very long time without contacts access and never faced an issue, installed from fdroid repo.
I do that too, but I got way too many ppl on wa and its hard to keep track of them.
So you want all your contacts to show up within the app?
I just want to have their names instead of phone numbers…
