Deleting Whatsapp (finally)

Bye bye, Whatsapp.

Today marks the day I deleted Whatsapp from my phone. From now on you cannot reach me there.

This was a long-running undertaking. Sadly that app is the only messenger a few of my contacts still use. It’s not easy to convince them to install another messenger app.1 I told all remaining contacts where they can find me and sent them the URL to my website.

At some point you have to pull the plug.

A few reasons for that decision

The reasons are diverse, but these are enough for me:

Whatsapp is owned by Facebook. Even though they said they will not merge Facebook and Whatsapp data, why should I believe that corporation? I do not feel that Facebook cares about privacy.2

And, in my opinion, privacy always was an afterthought on Whatsapp.3

If you think the security story looks better, browse this dedicated page on Wikipedia. It lists security and privacy incidents since 2011.

However, it misses the latest hack. Read about that in this Guardian article. This is not science fiction.

Screenshot of account deletion Screenshot of app deletion

Footnotes

  1. They use Whatsapp only. I think Signal and Riot are good alternatives. ↩

  2. Watch the movie The Great Hack if you haven’t yet. ↩

  3. The WhatsApp privacy problem., 2020-04-20 ↩

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