this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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And everyone in your address book not using WhatsApp should come by once in a while and slap you for selling their numbers for your convenience... You are right... keeping a basically inactive Facebook profile is harmless in comparison.
They all are already on WhatsApp though. All my phone contacts are WhatsApp contacts already (and have been before I added them).
If I need to interact with anyone who desires ultmost privacy I'm not idiot enough to ask for their phone number, and they'd be really out of their mind to share if that's the case.
But sure, I guess a cousin or smth might want to slap me in the face for "selling" data they already sold themselves years prior.
I live in Germany and everyone here uses WhatsApp. If you decide to uninstall it, you're cut off from 95% of your friends, family and your coworkers.
It's not an option to not use it, sadly. From what I understand, it's like iMessage in the USA. Extreme monopoly and very hard to break out of it.
Same here... and most of my contact list (and I) dropped WhatsApp when Meta bought them or a year later when the eavesdropping and phoning home to Meta was publically discussed in the media. The remaining minority is able to use another alternative on top of WhatsApp (that's one of the reason I like to remond them that they provide Meta with data from the people opting out...). That was also nearly a decade ago (2014/2015), so pretending that you need to use WhatsApp in 2023 is indeed a choice.
It's not as easy as you make it sound. Between 2015 and 2022, Whatsapp's marketshare has increased a lot in Germany. So it might've been comparatively easy to drop it 8 years ago. It's not anymore.
Maybe I'd be able to convince a lot of my friends to install another app just for me. But it would be hard to do and involve a lot of arguing on my end. I'm not a missionary and I choose to spend my lifetime for other, more important things.
Or maybe you would realize that a lot of people think the same but are also convinced to be alone and unable to change anything... Just like it happened for me back then the moment the first few made the effort to change. We will never know.