[tomschlick]

Yeah we prefer to keep our messages out of the hands of Facebook

[nonfamous]

It’s not the messages I worry about so much — it’s the contacts.

I can’t use WhatsApp because on iOS it asks for access to your contacts, which I refuse to give. (Facebook already burned me once, there.) So in WhatsApp, all my contacts show up as numeric phone numbers, and there’s no way to change that, so it’s basically useless to me.

[netsharc]

TBH all your contacts who use WhatsApp already uploaded your name and number combination to Zuck's server...

A data protection consultant once told me in theory I can sue my friends for violating my data privacy by doing that...

[lxgr]

That's indeed the part I like least about WhatsApp: The fact that it both requires phone numbers as identifiers, and insists on full phonebook access.

At least on iOS 18 it will become possible to provide partial phonebook access, as far as I've heard.

[Sakos]

Easier to discriminate against anybody who buys an Android, I guess. That's totally the better solution.

[tomschlick]

It's not discrimination to say "the message you just sent is green because it went over SMS (and now RCS) and we can't verify the E2E encryption, deliverability, etc like we can with iMessage".

[lxgr]

Ah, right, I forgot that nobody in the US uses Instagram or Facebook (which are both not end-to-end encrypted, like SMS and RCS, and unlike WhatsApp).

[cnasc]

I don’t use Facebook, and I’m not required to use Facebook or anything adjacent to it when I chat with my friends who do