162. Goodbye to WhatsApp!

After the recent changes mooted by WhatsApp, I have decided to move on from WhatsApp and shift to Signal.  Over the past couple of days, I have stopped using WhatsApp and have instructed all my contacts, who I frequently interact with, to stop contacting me on WhatsApp.

The recent changes mooted by WhatsApp is not anything new.  They have just started saying that they will do these things from now onwards.  It is another matter that they had been continuously doing these same things since they got acquired by Facebook.  They just wanted to “inform” the users of the same now so that in case anything untoward happens later, they can always say that they had informed all the users about this😊.

Now Facebook is a company that is owned by a person who had cheated his colleagues while starting Facebook.  He had to pay them off with huge sums when they approached the courts mentioning that they too had collaborated to start the company.  What can you expect of such a person?  I had closed down my Facebook account some 3-4 years ago.  In case I want someone to know my details or my adventures, I will contact them directly.  I don’t need a third party to share these things.  And I don’t need a 3rd party thing to wish people for birthdays and anniversaries.  I prefer calling them direct and wishing them.

Facebook is the company which refused to delete accounts/pages of people who had passed away and their relatives wanted to remove their accounts.  Their motto seems to be that if something is shared on their network, the data is theirs to keep and the user can’t have any say in this.  Having such a huge amount of data also helps them in procuring ads in their network and getting huge revenues.

It is also important to note that the privacy policy that WhatsApp wants to implement now, is not valid in Europe.  The reason being that Europe has strict policy on sharing of data and they don’t allow such sharing.  So, as long as someone doesn’t ask them or pinpoint them the issues, they act as if they are doing a favour to all.  They don’t still charge for keeping an account with them as they are able to monetize all the users’ data by selling it to others.  Once people become aware of the privacy of their data, they might have to revert to a subscription-based model.

Recently when Apple came up with an option to block all tracking of users in their latest operating system, Facebook came out with full page ads in newspapers in US stating that Apple’s policy is against small business who won’t be able to flourish if they are not able to track their customers😊!!  Most of the revenue that Facebook gets is by tracking its users with the kind of data it collects and if one company comes with an option of stopping that tracking, imagine the kind of money Facebook will be losing.  Just to stop others in thinking that way, they came up with such ads to deter other people to think that way!!

You have to know that nothing is free in this world and if you are getting it free, then you are losing something else that you are not yet aware of😊!!

Having used Signal for about 15-20 days now, following are the dis-advantages that I have seen so far..

  • No option to add “Status”.  I use this only for indicating my latest blog article and rarely for other purposes.  I feel if anyone is that interested in my blog, they will save the link and visit it every Saturday after 11am, when I publish it.
  • You cannot add more than 1 message for forwarding to others.  If you want to send multiple messages to same recipient, you have to again select the message and send it separately.  This will stop unnecessary bombardment of messages that had become too frequent with WhatsApp!!
  • You cannot forward the same message to multiple recipients and now would have to send it individually!  This will also stop the clutter of various forwards that one used to get from different sources!!
Other than this, I didn’t find any other disadvantages.  However, there are some advantages using Signal…

  •        You can now send up to 100MB files through Signal instead of the 16MB limit of WhatsApp
  •     You get less messages on a daily basis and you don’t have to spend extra time reading those messages!!
  •        WhatsApp uses the same source code of Signal, so security is paramount. 
  •       The data that is sent through Signal is stored on your and recipient’s phone so that no 3rd party can look into that!

So, from onwards, please stop contacting me on WhatsApp as I would have deleted my account.  In case I have not deleted it, I will surely not be responding to the messages on WhatsApp.

Cheers till next time!

Today’s Observation

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation😊

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