The trend today has been to stop using WhatsApp ever since the policy was updated to allow sharing your personal information with Facebook. Some are recommending switching to other centralized messaging systems like Signal or Telegram, but there’s a problem with that too. Read on to learn how to recognize when a messaging app is out to profit off of and control you versus enabling better communications between people.
Personally, I specifically never became dependent on WhatsApp because 10 years ago I knew something like this would happen eventually. I mean the clues are pretty obvious; it’s a closed system, every app has to connect to the same centralized servers, it requires your phone number… it was clearly designed from the beginning to: