Transcription
On WhatsApp, your personal messages, they're yours. Over 2 billion people are using WhatsApp. I'm going to show you the darker side of WhatsApp. The ads that are coming, the data collection issues, why the encryption isn't quite what you think, and more.
The very first thing, and probably one of the biggest misconceptions I see, there's a lot of people who rightfully don't like Facebook, and they haven't quite associated Facebook with Instagram or, yes, WhatsApp. Now, WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook way back in 2014 for quite a bit of money. And the original founders that sold WhatsApp, let's just say, haven't enjoyed the decision they made. It's this connection that people ignore. You can't dislike and hate Facebook, but still support WhatsApp. They are the same company.
Now, it's really important to talk about end-to-end encryption because this is almost all of their marketing. On WhatsApp, no one can see or hear your personal messages. Not even us. No one can see or hear your personal messages. Not even WhatsApp. On WhatsApp, no one can see or hear your personal messages. Not even us.
Now, in fairness to WhatsApp, their encryption itself is quite solid. It's actually using the Signal protocol behind the Signal Messenger. I would already challenge a lot of people if they like the fact that it uses Signal's protocol. Why not just use Signal? But it's still important to tackle this because just the encryption is not the only thing that's being collected. WhatsApp doesn't protect metadata. It doesn't protect backups. Group chat metadata, which means meta knows which groups you're in, who you're in there with, the group's name, who created it, and lots of other information to actually be able to tell who's talking to who at what time. And that data can also be shared with other meta account information. And there's so much more that meta collects directly and indirectly, which includes things like contact lists, phone numbers, device information, usage patterns, online statuses, read receipts, location data, IP addresses, group memberships and administrator status, payment information through WhatsApp pay, and cross-platform tracking with other meta services.
So, no, just because meta can't see the direct message content doesn't mean there isn't a massive privacy concern. In fact, top US officials have even said they kill people based on metadata. So, don't fool yourself into their marketing tactic of just saying, well, it's end-to-end encrypted, so you're good, bro. No, bro, you're probably not. Privacy doesn't just mean encryption. It means everything that happens within the encryption and outside the encryption. And outside is where WhatsApp critically fails.
And on the topic of this, one really important thing. If you are using WhatsApp for whatever reason, you need to know that the message backups that are done to things like iCloud and Google Cloud are not end-to-end encrypted by default. That means when you're using end-to-end encryption between you and a friend or family member, even what WhatsApp says is kind of not true. Because if even one of you is doing cloud backups outside of WhatsApp without the encryption enabled, then that is still a copy of your messages being stored without encryption. So, it's critically important for all of you to get not just yourselves, but all of your contacts to enable end-to-end encrypted backups in WhatsApp.
To summarize, WhatsApp is very sneaky with their marketing, and they are very much trying to trick you into thinking that this is a completely safe space to chat with others, when in reality, there is just encryption, which is a good starting point, but there's still so much more happening that puts you in jeopardy.
Now, if you don't believe me or you don't think this is a big problem, it's really worth asking, "How is WhatsApp free?" and this is a common pattern with all Facebook products. Facebook comes out, it's considered one of the best social media networks out there, convinces everyone to join it, and slowly enshitifies to the point where everybody hates the platform. This is their playbook for everything. Again, Facebook rolls out, clean experience, gets ads. Instagram rolls out, clean experience, gets ads. Threads rolls out, clean experience, gets ads. WhatsApp took a long time, overall clean experience, getting ads. So, don't fall for this one more time. Meta has already said they're going to recommend which ads to show WhatsApp users, including a person's country, city, device, language, and data, like who they follow or how they interact with ads. This has been directly confirmed by their head of product for business messaging. So, I'm not making this up. I will leave sources down in the description so you can also look into WhatsApp's privacy practices.
Now, I want to give you things to make yourself safer leaving this video, but before I do that, I want to quickly touch on our sponsor, which is actually very relevant to Meta and Facebook, Redact.dev. Redact.dev helps you bulk delete old Facebook posts, Instagram content, Twitter and X history, and really every other major social media platform so that you can clean your online identity if you're on any of these platforms already. The reason why this is great is it's fully automated instead of you needing to manually delete years of content, and aside from it just deleting it, it can also archive it for you locally on your machine. So you get to keep a copy of all your data, and there's no FOMO involved with having to delete everything and never see it again. Back in the day when I deleted my Facebook account, I would have done anything to have Redact, and of course I wouldn't have a sponsor that wasn't privacy respecting. Everything that Redact does is local on your system. It never goes to any server of theirs, so even if you use Redact on a new device, you actually have to re-login to all your accounts there because there's no way for it to share data across the two systems. It's super well designed. If you want to take control of your online footprint and make an impact today, check out redact.dev down in the description, and you can even use code "TECHLORE10" for a discount on checkout. Thank you Redact for sponsoring our content. Check them out down below.
And now let's get into the actionable stuff. So let's see what we can do together and what your options are. WhatsApp's problems are that its end-to-end encryption is based on a "trust me bro, don't verify us" And finally, Vibe because it's not open source. And more importantly, it has extensive data collection and sharing with the rest of Facebook's platforms. Meta is in control of updates, features, and privacy policies, as well as the future, like advertising. And there is no transparency into data handling practices. It's a "trust us, don't verify us" approach, which is not what we want from our software.
So here are ways that we can address this. First, let's start with if you need to stay inside of the WhatsApp ecosystem. First, I'd encourage you to go through their in-app privacy settings. You can adjust things like last seen, profile photos, groups, read receipts, etc. This empowers you to do a few things. I also encourage you to enable two-step verification, regularly check linked devices, be aware of suspicious links and scams, and then for all new chats, I would go into settings, privacy, and default message timer for disappearing messages so that messages will automatically disappear after a certain amount of time. I'd also encourage you to check permissions for WhatsApp. Don't grant any unnecessary permissions, and also make sure to lock down the app and keep your operating system up to date and just follow overall good security practices across your devices. It's going to keep you safer across all your apps, so do that for WhatsApp. And of course, I already covered this, but please, please, please enable end-to-end encrypted cloud backups, not just for yourself, but encourage others to do the same. This will keep not just you, but everyone inside the WhatsApp ecosystem safer.
Now, you don't have to just delete WhatsApp. It's going to be hard to convert everyone all at once, but I want to encourage you to start adding alternatives and slowly migrating some of your contacts to those alternatives. I find Signal to be probably the best overall alternative to WhatsApp. They try to bring over some of those features that you probably enjoy, and it's all privacy-respecting, it's open source, it's from a non-profit, and it's the same protocol for end-to-end encryption that WhatsApp touts, but it's developed by Signal, so just get it from the original source. If you want something more intense, you're going to have options like Session, Matrix, SimpleX, and those are all fantastic and give you a lot better privacy, but just keep in mind the usability for all of those is going to be a bit of a downgrade from WhatsApp. As a whole, I do find Signal to be probably the best alternative to WhatsApp, as overall the best WhatsApp alternative with privacy in mind.
I am hopeful that people start to realize these and hopefully demand change from WhatsApp and to push them to be more transparent and verifiable instead of just, "Trust me, bro, I care about your privacy," which is never what we want. We want it to be verifiable.
I want to thank our sponsor, Redact.dev. Again, check them out down in the description. They can help you delete things like your Facebook account without FOMO, and you get to save all your data. I also want to thank our Techlorians, who are our community supporters who give back to what we do, and actually we have a Signal group, so if you want a little place to join and get used to Signal, we have that group for our supporters. And of course, I want to thank you all for being here, learning something new about technology, and hopefully improving your tech life a little bit more. And if you made even a small change, that makes me very happy, and this video did something positive for the world. So thank you for watching, and I'll see you next time on Techlore.
Hey, thanks for making it to the end of the video. I just put out an application for a full-time editor and content producer role at Techlore. So if you want to join the team and be a part of things, it's a global position, so feel free to apply. Let me know your skill sets, and I'd love to chat and see if you're a good fit. Thanks for watching, and I hope one of you can help take us to the next level.