Transcription
WhatsApp is terrible and you should not use it. If you do use it, you should delete it. WhatsApp is now officially running targeted ads and I'm urging you to leave it before it gets worse because it will go downhill from here very fast.
How did we as a society come to accept a total and complete surrender of our social and private lives that is emotionless, antisocial, antihuman conglomerate overlord? Is it an alternative to Facebook and the private sector? Uh, yes, Senator. The average American uses eight different apps to communicate with their friends and stay in touch with people. Liar. This person is a liar. Four of those apps are owned by him. Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Four of the top six of the mobile apps are are our social apps that and WhatsApp is by far the top mobile messaging app worldwide. Zuckerberg has always been a liar and he always got away with it. I think it's more useful to like make things happen and then like apologize later.
When he first bought WhatsApp for $22 billion, he promised that the app would never run ads. But it doesn't just end there. Zuckerberg is still lying directly in the statement about how they will be running these ads inside WhatsApp. These are supposed to be ads built with privacy in mind. But they are not. For now, the ads will be targeted based on your country, city, language, the channels you follow, and your ad interactions, which on its own is a uniquely profiled set of data. But this is a boiling the frog moment because everything inside WhatsApp is prepared to take it that next step further when quarterly earnings call for it. All the technology to use your WhatsApp data including your phone number and personally identifiable information is ready to be linked to your shadow advertising profile Zuckerberg secretly keeps on everybody whether they like it or not.
Why would Zuckerberg ever be concerned with making privacy focused ad business? In the announcement, Zuckerberg makes a promise that they will never sell or share your phone number to advertisers. But don't fall for this manipulative workplay. Facebook has always been using your phone for targeted advertising. In fact, Facebook would be using your phone number for targeted ads, even if you provided it solely for second factor authentication to receive SMS codes when signing into your account from a new device. Facebook lied about the fact that this is how they were using people's phone numbers. They also did everything they could to hide the fact and keep users unaware. Until an academic investigation into Facebook's advertising network revealed that everyone's phone numbers become targetable by advertisers. Even in the case you never provided Facebook with your phone number, Meta could still gain access to it. How? Your friends that gave Facebook contact permissions would have uploaded your phone number to Facebook and Facebook would then use your phone number for targeted advertising without your permission or knowledge. Why do you think Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $22 billion to get the phone books of $1.5 billion people around the world? In WhatsApp, phone number registration is mandatory. You can't avoid giving Zuckerberg your phone number to use it. How long do you think Meta will exercise restraint and not move the goalposts to use your WhatsApp number for advertising, especially after years of repeatedly lying about using phone numbers for ads?
So that's why I believe that the future is private. Don't be duped again. WhatsApp absolutely cannot be trusted. If WhatsApp advertising was private, it would only be serving ads based on general interest. Like when you search for cars on DuckGo, you get ads for cars and not ads based on your account or your browser history. WhatsApp ads will be targeted because they will be using the same advertising network that Facebook is using. And that ad network is already allowing advertisers to target people's phone numbers if they have them. So if you use the same phone number for WhatsApp as you use on Facebook, even if it's just for security purposes, your data between WhatsApp and Facebook will be linked. Meta has already change WhatsApp's terms of service to allow for this phone number linking. Why would Zuckerberg go through all this effort to set this up technologically as well as legally if they never planned on actualizing it? Mind you, this was in preparation for years. Facebook bought WhatsApp in 2014. Two years later, WhatsApp began sharing data with Facebook by default with an option to opt out. Then another two years later, Facebook made another technical and legal update by deepening the integration with WhatsApp and removing the option to opt out of data sharing between the apps. Then another two years later, Zuckerberg announced WhatsApp will be finally running ads, which was postponed only due to backlash. But you see the pattern, right? It's boiling the frock slowly but surely moving the goal post one step at a time because Zuckerberg is counting on you always accepting a new update to their terms of service and their privacy policy.
The ultimate goal of WhatsApp is for Zuckerberg to turn it into the ultimate surveillance capitalism machine. Before Facebook bought it, WhatsApp used to be funded by an annual subscription of 99 cents. Zuckerberg removed that fee and made the app completely free. Because under Zuckerberg's rule, we are not the users of Meta Apps. The real users paying for the service are advertisers. We are the product sold to the advertisers. And we do not sell data to advertisers. No, we absolutely are being sold to the advertisers. The quit proquo is surveillance as a service. Zuckerberg is not directly selling the information he gathers on us. That would be a stupid business decision. Rather, he's following us everywhere, even outside of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. The reach of his empire spans across the web with tracking pixels and hidden analytics code collecting your information from all the other apps you use and websites you visit. Zuckerberg has so much information on us. He knows what you buy and wear, even if it's in a brickandmortar store. No, Zuckerberg isn't selling off our data transactionally. He's surveilling all of us on behalf of advertisers and data brokers who then pay to use the data to spam us with ads. If you sign up for a mailing list, Zuckerberg will allow advertisers to use your email address to target you on Facebook. If you provided a retailer your phone number, Zuckerberg will let advertisers to reach you on WhatsApp. That's the end goal. WhatsApp is surveillance as a service. Its immense data inventory is by far the biggest out of any messaging app out there.
Zuckerberg will always post that WhatsApp uses end to end encryption, which is only true because he didn't build it. It was built by Signal and implemented by the original WhatsApp team. But Zuckerberg since designed WhatsApp to collect so much metadata about how you use the service. They can pretty much predict what you were talking about with whom, when, and for how long, even if the content is encrypted. Zuckerberg can now use AI to analyze your messaging traffic and patterns and see when you're sending videos or messages to your friends. This sounds crazy, but I actually covered this in my previous video on traffic analysis on VPNs. And Zuckerberg's Empire is the most capable of achieving this new level of surveillance. They could combine their traffic analysis with all the data they gather from thirdparty websites you visit and apps you use. And by analyzing how you use all of those, they could predict what you're likely to be sharing and talking about with your friends on WhatsApp.
The last lie I want to debunk is that WhatsApp is your only or the best option. It isn't. Zuckerberg is massively inflating the numbers of active users on his platforms. This has been proven by investigations that showed that when users are inactive, Meta will start sending fake alerts to people urging them to log back in for security reasons. When they do, Meta will register that as an active user to prove numbers to their shareholders. But people are definitely leaving his empire because they're fed up with it and because they know there are better options out there. So, I'm going to give you three. The ultimate best is Signal. In terms of user friendliness, it's as easy as using WhatsApp and it's free. The difference is that Signal is completely open source and it's a nonprofit. There's no advertising on Signal and Signal doesn't retain nor collect your metadata. It has all the features you need in a messaging app and all of them are private and secure. The second best option is Threma. Threma is based outside of Five Surveillance Alliance, so it doesn't cooperate with foreign governments. The service is paid, but it is more anonymous than Signal because you can easily use it without a phone number and without Google. The third best option is the session messenger. Session is also a nonprofit and it's trying to go a step further to protect your metadata through an anonymous overlay network. It doesn't have as many features as signal as of yet, but it's good that it exists because we do need more options. I also want to mention a hardcore option for the ultimate apocalypse dystopia, and that is the Brier messenger. Brier is so private and anonymous, it literally couldn't be taken down by governments. Even if the internet went down globally, Brier could still work over wireless networks and Bluetooth.
Now feel free to start with signal and keep another option handy in case you want to play around with it. Three is also good if you want to have something that is outside of the United States. Now I understand that if you switch to Signal or Threma or whatever else, you may be the first among your friends. Tell them to start using Signal with you. If they are reluctant, make it a habit to not respond to them immediately. Make them wait a few hours or even days. Tell them to message you on Signal. And when they do, make it your priority to respond immediately. This way, you will be doing a little Pavlov experiment on your friends to get them to understand that it'll reach you better on Signal than anywhere else until they start communicating with you exclusively on Signal. If they still don't want to switch, them.
Now, join my Patreon for my podcast and because you want to see me making more of these videos. I couldn't do this without your help. If you don't join my Patreon, I will install WhatsApp on your