On Not Using WhatsApp

(or any other Facebook product)

To those who spend their lives dictating how others should walk...
Between the equivocal and univocal, the ambiguous and the absolute, I fly-dance about your tightropes.

🌱 Dedication

To Pavel Durov's moments of bravery.

🌱 A Five-Word Summary

It is contrary to love.

🌱 Background

Facebook has been called "the world’s most avaricious data harvesting machine".⁽¹⁾ It acquired WhatsApp in 2014.⁽²⁾ The co-founder of WhatsApp, Brian Acton, left Facebook in 2017⁽³⁾ to help start Signal Messenger, and later tweeted #deletefacebook⁽⁴⁾ after the Cambridge Analytica mess.⁽⁵⁾

Under pressure from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to monetize WhatsApp, he pushed back as Facebook questioned the encryption he'd helped build and laid the groundwork to show targeted ads and facilitate commercial messaging....It was perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history....the decision cost him $850 million.⁽⁶⁾

The founder, Jan Koum, also left not long after.⁽⁷⁾ Instagram’s founders eventually quit as well after the platform was acquired.⁽⁸⁾⁽⁹⁾ Why?

🌱 Claim

Using WhatsApp in 2025 is like smoking in 1955: an easy, popular, safe, and fun way to bring people together.

🌱 An Idea

Let's start with a question: Do you respect the people you talk to? I will assume the answer is yes. Then why do you communicate with them using software which does not respect them? If you wouldn't send them a letter using paper which smells like manure, how much less should you send them messages on a digital platform which violates Kant's categorical imperative?⁽¹⁰⁾

🌱 Flaws

The history of security flaws in WhatsApp is quite long; I will not recount them all here. Links to a number of incidents can be found below. I will focus instead on the structural issues which would make me choose to not use WhatsApp even if their security record were perfect.

Chats are ostensibly end-to-end encrypted by the Signal Protocol, but the implementation is not open source,⁽¹¹⁾ so there is no way to know whether backdoors are intentionally or unintentionally present in the code. Functionally, I treat this situation as one wherein all messages sent should be assumed to be public information; it is accurate only in a pyrrhic sense to say that conversations are secure. "When Sandberg....was asked by U.S. lawmakers in early September if WhatsApp still used end-to-end encryption, she avoided a straight yes or no."⁽¹²⁾.
Some will say that WhatsApp is better than SMS because SMS texts are sent in plain text. Okay. I will grant that for those somehow still using SMS in 2024, switching to WhatsApp is an improvement. This viewpoint would have been meaningful in 2014. But 10 years have passed and there are better options now.
Having a WhatsApp or Instagram account is essentially the same as having a Facebook account from a privacy perspective. 18 months after WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook, a new terms of service linked accounts to Facebook and they paid a $122 million fine for giving misleading information to the EU.^{(13), (14)}
The Commission has found that, contrary to Facebook's statements in the 2014 merger review process, the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook and WhatsApp users' identities already existed in 2014, and that Facebook staff were aware of such a possibility.⁽¹⁵⁾

Users have since had to accept a new terms of service which permits sharing data with Facebook if they wish to continue using the platform.^(16)(17)(18) Two years after WhatsApp was acquired, the database of mobile numbers was given to Facebook.⁽¹⁹⁾ Facebook has since been fined in Ireland in 2021⁽²⁰⁾ and 2023⁽²¹⁾ for further similar violations (for context, they made $134 billion⁽²²⁾ in 2023; $5.5 million is 0.004% of that), and so those who regard the GDPR as protecting their WhatsApp use from Facebook are simply naive. Even if such trust was warranted, if you have to rely on a government to protect you from your own messaging app, you should find another app.
Sometimes people talk about how bad things are done using a given website or app, and how steps should be taken to prevent those bad things from happening. Without wading into the freedom vs. tyranny debate, I simply wish to point out a detail which forms the basis of a more moral relationship to software:
As unwitting monetary support of Facebook is an inherent property of using the WhatsApp platform, I regard it as a violation of consent. Naturally, Facebook lawyers will say you agreed to the terms of service when you signed up, but we all know that putting the letter before the spirit of consent is incongruous with real life and sensibility. On the other hand, with platforms like SimpleX Chat, donations are an intentional choice which comes from the state of one's heart and mind.

The ethical considerations relating to a service sustained by donations vs. one which is for-profit are fundamentally different. If use of a platform is monetised, users are indirectly supporting whatever the platform is used for. If your use of a platform is not monetised, this is not the case. For those who wish to avoid enabling evil in even a small way, using a platform that commodifies you to continue its existence should be an obvious line in the sand. This should be thought about when choosing to use any app.

The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much 'truth' he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.⁽²³⁾

Naturally, such thinking complicates the decision to financially support Signal or SimpleX. Good things are inevitably used for bad purposes in a fallen world. I see donations to open-source projects as contributing to the livelihoods of the individual developers who work on personal projects for fun and share them for the benefit of others. Well-meaning tragedy is at least more honest than disingenuous decency.

Whosoever shall fall upon that stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.⁽²⁴⁾
If you know someone who doesn’t use WhatsApp, but is saved as a contact in your phone, their phone number is shared with WhatsApp without his or her consent if you allow WhatsApp to access your contacts.⁽²⁵⁾ WhatsApp will also share your contacts and other users who have a targeted individual in their contacts in response to warrants. Of course, GrapheneOS users can avoid this by using the contact scopes feature.
WhatsApp is unique in how quickly it can produce data to law-enforcement agencies....every 15 minutes.⁽²⁶⁾
Here are some other miscellaneous facts:
- The Swiss army banned the use of WhatsApp because of the ability of the US government to access data under the CLOUD Act.⁽²⁷⁾
- Since 2019, U.N. officials are also forbidden from using WhatsApp.⁽²⁸⁾
- By default, chat history backups to Google Drive are not encrypted.⁽²⁹⁾ Unencrypted backups have allowed deleted messages to be recovered on iOS in the past.⁽³⁰⁾
- If you add a phone number for 2FA, Facebook uses it to target you with ads.⁽³¹⁾
- WhatsApp bans users from using 3rd-party versions of the app to access the service.⁽³²⁾
- In 2015, WhatsApp made the anti-competitive move of blocking links to Telegram.⁽³³⁾
- In 2018, WhatsApp tried to control misinformation by limiting users' ability to forward messages.^(34),(35) They claimed these changes would help keep WhatsApp private.⁽³⁶⁾ Knowing whether I forward a message to 1 person or 2 people is not private.
- Facebook vociferously opposed Apple's mandatory privacy labels because they revealed how WhatsApp’s metadata collection was far worse than that of iMessage (see the comparison screenshot in the link).⁽³⁷⁾
- I will applaud Facebook for opposing the United Kingdom's recent inane efforts^{(38)(39)(40)(41)(42)} to promote a world where end-to-end encryption = "encryption" + a backdoor to allow scanning of content. But I don't believe for a second that they didn't do this at least partly out of a desire to virtue signal.
The fact that one can be banned from using the service at all should be seen as an issue. Our relationships with others should never have to assume that another person gave us permission to converse. This is simply a digital restatement of the ideals of freedom of association, assembly, and speech. Decentralised platforms better reflect the individuality of the soul. You cannot self-host WhatsApp.
As a word, "WhatsApp" is an annoying pun and one which references a rather lackadaisical salutation.
They're adding AI and you can't disable it.^(43)(42)
Facebook tries to avoid using the phrase "content moderation" with respect to WhatsApp, and introduces a degree of separation by having everyone work for Accenture rather than Facebook.⁽⁴⁴⁾ When messages are reported, the previous 4 messages are also sent to the moderators. The unencrypted data includes your unique mobile phone ID and even your phone battery level.
Those living in the Gaza Strip should be aware of Israel's Lavender AI, which generates targets for assassination. One of the data inputs to the AI is whether or not you are in a WhatsApp group with a suspected militant.⁽⁴⁵⁾ One of the software tracking programs is obscenely named "Where's Daddy?", because it waits for the individual to enter his home before bombing.⁽⁴⁶⁾ How many deaths is Facebook complicit in because of this?

🌱 My Goals

Zak Doffman said: WhatsApp can afford to lose millions of concerned users as a trade-off to its commercial plans, knowing that it will retain the vast, indifferent majority.⁽⁴⁷⁾ I don't agree that people are indifferent. I also do not aim to cause WhatsApp to lose merely millions of users. I aim to make it lose billions. I aim to bankrupt Facebook and leave the bad memory of its carcass in the distant past, one slow conversation at a time. I want Article 13 of the Swiss Constitution⁽⁴⁸⁾ to be in the constitution of every country. I wish to help people to live more coherently: to choose the software that they use as thoughtfully as the clothes that they wear, because both are extensions of our personality.

In 2010, when the platform had 350 million users, Zuckerberg said that if he were to create Facebook again, user information would be public by default: ....we decided that these would be the social norms now.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Oh you did, did you? A few months later, he wrote in the Washington Post that "You have control over how your information is shared" and "We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone."⁽⁵⁰⁾ In 2014, Facebook’s privacy product manager, Michael Nowak said: Now we're thinking about privacy not just as a set of controls or settings, but as a set of experiences that help people feel comfortable.⁽⁵¹⁾ I've decided that the social norms now are the opposite, and prefer for discomfort to bring about change: take responsibility for your life, stop sleepwalking through a harmful status quo, and encourage others to do likewise.

🌱 Ads

How much are you worth? According to Facebook ad revenues, each user is worth about $4-70/year.⁽⁵²⁾ Whether one wishes to conceptualise the universe in terms of the simulation hypothesis or Acts 17:28, a metaphysics of information (Luciano Floridi) applies. We are data. To have your data collected or sold without your consent is as acceptable as having your organs sold or collected without your consent.

Personalised ads are useful and efficient: they allow one to learn more quickly about things which are more likely to be meaningful. This essay is not opposed to them. For an example of how they could be done properly, read about Basic Attention Tokens⁽⁵³⁾ in the Brave browser.

Violating everything that the founders of WhatsApp stood for, Facebook is now incorporating personalised advertisements into WhatsApp as of 2025.⁽⁵⁴⁾ How far the app has fallen. See this blog post they wrote in 2012, Why we don't sell ads: We knew we could do what most people aim to do every day: avoid ads. No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow....Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought....when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

🌱 Next Steps

I don't recommend directly pressuring those motivated too much by convenience to switch platforms. Rather, simply say that you will become unavailable on WhatsApp after a certain date, and provide information about how to contact you after that point. Once enough people do this, the world of what apps are normal to use will change overnight, and those people will come on board as they did with Gmail in the past. After removing a speck from your own eye, the beauty of the world becomes more visible (and the absurdity).

🌱 Instagram

All of the above applies to Instagram as well. In addition, I prefer to see the world through another's eyes not in solitude whilst on my phone, but in his or her presence, and to share pictures thoughtfully with individual people. Therefore, even if Instagram had no flaws or association with Facebook, it is designed to facilitate the self-expression of a personality not my own. It's okay if you're different in this regard, but that should be all the more reason to choose a better platform with the same functionality, like Pixelfed. I also find the "Insta-" part of the app's name distasteful, as it reminds me of the concept of instant gratification.

🍪 As a bonus cookie aside, the basic functionality of Snapchat, a platform which just started experimenting with putting ads in the app's chat windows,⁽⁵⁵⁾ can be easily replaced by Signal's "stories" feature. Snapchat is flawed in time like Twitter is flawed in space: the one encourages ephemerality, the other, abridged thinking. Shakespeare said "Brevity is the soul of wit". I say brevity can be the soul of wit: gardeners trim, guillotines truncate.

Apps are like digital plants in a computer garden.

To browse Instagram without tracking or popups trying to force you to join, use a site like Flufi: https://flufi.me/.

🌱 Wrapping Up With A Philosophical Bow

I'll conclude with a quote from Mark Zuckerberg describing those who trust him: "dumb fucks".⁽⁵⁶⁾ If I shared this document with you, it's because I care about you more than he does, and I refuse for our time together to be passed on a service provided by miserly liars. I regard it as reasonable to view WhatsApp in its current form as opposed to the spirit of Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions, to the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and John Locke, and to good manners. As Nicolás Gómez Dávila said,

Modern man fears technology’s destructive capacity, when it is its constructive capacity that threatens him.⁽⁵⁷⁾

McLuhan's "The medium is the message"⁽⁵⁸⁾ is not merely a way to think about semiotics, but also a call to choose our mediums. In every choice, the sum total of self-aware thinking can be implicit.

Speaking of choices, you may have noticed that I chose to always refer to the company as "Facebook". We should not grant them the pretensions of their new moniker.

🌱 Isaiah 43:19

My top recommendation is SimpleX Chat, followed by Signal Messenger. SimpleX is based on a superior concept which I believe will eventually be the future of mobile communications, but is also a relatively new and still evolving app. If video chatting or sharing video files is particularly important to you, Signal is better for this at present.

~ The Metamodernist Engineer ✨

P.S. Guys, don't ask a girl for her number. Respect her by asking her to join SimpleX. Demonstrate that you can lead humanity down better paths before it becomes popular to walk them.

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