Well, I finally did it: I am completely divorced from the greater Facebook empire.
WhatsApp - the popular messaging app owned by Facebook - will begin sharing user data with its parent company starting on February 8th. Previously it was possible to opt out of this farce, but no longer. You either share your personal data, or you don’t use the app at all. The absorption of WhatsApp into the Facebook ecosystem will finally be complete in a few weeks’ time.
This was the last straw for me, and yesterday my entire friend group migrated over to Signal. It seems plenty of others did as well. Signal is a cross-platform messaging app, backed by a non-profit company, that promises complete privacy. Messages are end-to-end encrypted, user data are not harvested for anything, and messages can be set to expire, deleted forever.
Perhaps more so than the privacy benefits, I really want nothing to do with Facebook. I’ve long stopped using the main Facebook app, and quit instagram some years ago. Those platforms are mindless time-sucks that negatively affects mental health. Not once since deletion did I ever pined to go back to instagram, even though I dearly miss the app’s early days. When it was just the photographs, and nothing else.
I kept using WhatsApp because even though Facebook bought the company, it was completely standalone and had no integration with anything else. A walled garden compared to Facebook’s own messenger app, where content is mined for target advertisement. That will no longer be the case come February 8th, which is why I’ve jumped ship to Signal.
Farewell, Facebook.
Sun baked.