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.
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 hate facebook and it’s lizard CEO. Also Signal is open source and private.
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…
Same thing that made me choose WhatsApp, people are there. We need to force companies to allow for open messenger standards now
WhatsApp has to be interoperable already but Signal is doing some moral high ground thing where they don’t let their users choose to engage in it
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…
…how do you know?
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.
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.
Also the pic of him in the Trump inauguration and the pic of him with Epstein if someone needs more pics
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
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.
Meta
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
The friend I mentioned actively uses Facebook and Instagram. I have tried to argue against it many times but I am getting exhausted. I just don’t want to be forced to use spyware because the majority said so
You arn’t going to get them to end thier use, so you can only draw a line for yourself and decide not to participate if they don’t go with Signal. It sucks but if they value your presense then they will need to decide to branch out and use another app. And JFK if they use those apps, they can fucking install another and use a better one
Easy and insulting way of finding out how important you are to your friends is to tell them on Whatsapp “I’m done with being forced to use this spyware app, I’m moving to Signal, you can contact me there.” Then maybe reminding them a week later about this, then uninstall Whatsapp.
Either they think you are important enough that they go through the awful trouble of spending 90 seconds of their lives installing the Signal app, or they think thats too much trouble to keep in contact with you.
I did that, found out that my friends didn’t really care too much about me lol. A couple did and thats nice. You don’t need 735 friends anyway. Or at least I dont.
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.
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.
