One is owned by a US tech corp whose primary income stream is building advertising profiles on users and selling advertising space to businesses while handing data off to authoritarian governments without warrants.

The other is a US non profit where the FBI admitted the only data they can get from them is when the user registered and when they were last online.

Meta

All the reasons the good folks have set out here are great.

I tell my employee: if you don't have a secure line of communication already installed when you need it, it's too late. Ask me how I know....

Zucc at the time. That they're American at all now.

It doesn't spam your phone with photos, unless you decide to download them

It doesn't backup your conversations to your already nearly full, Google owned Drive

Dark mode by default

Not owned by Meta

No frills, I couldn't care less for "personal stories" or whatever bs Whatsapp has

Basically it is somewhat more respectful of your agency as a user.

...edit: yes you have a setting to toggle backup off. And to change background to whatever you want. And I'm sorry for you, because your deeply cynical friends (your words) probably won't care about my points either. Because in essence, all my reasons rest on personal values. Which your friends already don't care about, else they would be complaining about things such as no space on phone or being annoyed at having to change settings for things they don't want or need.

I use signal but never managed to get rid of WhatsApp. It's a default app nowadays and most people use it. I constantly deal with random customers and whatnot through it. Only family is on signal. Which is sort of nice, I see a signal notification and know it's someone important.

Shitbook knowingly contributed to the genocide against the Rohingas in Myanmar. I want nothing to do with a company that is this evil.

The sole fact that it's open source should be enough to convince anyone, but assuming your family isn't familiar with the concept you'd have to explain it to them. It can turn into a big conversation pretty quickly. The way I've done it (with a close friend group) is with the help of a friend, a respected member of this group who happens to be a developer and militant, so we were two people telling everybody that we need to switch, one of which essentially considered an authority in the matter. If I were you I'd try to find that second person. In numbers, you need fewer arguments to convince people.

You might think you don't have anything to hide right now and you're fine with a corporation collecting your data. However, you never know when something that is inextricable from your persona might be made illegal and you'd be prosecuted based on the metadata openly available through your messaging platform.

It's what happened to Jews in Germany

In favour of whatsapp:

• You've already got it installed

Against whatsapp:

• It's one of those tech platforms owned by and run for the benefit of evil billionaires
• The source code isn't available, so nobody really knows if it's secure at all
• The metadata probably all just quietly flows into the Facebook data maelstrom
• It never worked properly on my android phone that doesn't have Google services
• It differs from Signal only in ways that make it worse

What's app is Facebook, what other argument do you need? Unless this you retirement home group chat how the fuck is anyone under 50 still using Facebook.

Meta. But perhaps an additional and entirely petty reason: It's a terrible pun.

Fuck the zuck

Same thing that made me choose WhatsApp, people are there. We need to force companies to allow for open messenger standards now

WhatsApp is a product of Meta, one of the most outright evil organisations in the world. Signal isn't - the Signal Foundation isn't perfect, but they do at least try to do right by their users.

Signal is nonprofit

Whatsapp = Facebook (Meta)

thats everything you need to know about the striking differences of the two. One actually tries to respect your privacy while the other is exploiting you for using its product

I am unconvinced that Zuckerberg isn't personally searching Meta messages to select future Epstein Island 2.0 victims.

I've had friends who had close calls with what seemed to them to be a kidnapping attempt by a paid organized group of people.

I dismissed their experience.

Then the Epstein files released.

Tinfoil hat incoming:

Zuckerberg's whole organization makes a hell of a lot more sense if their real product is profiles allowing billionaires to select their next rape victims.