Hi!
If you're here it's probably because I've asked you to move our conversation from WhatsApp to Signal.
WhatsApp is owned and developed by Meta (formerly Facebook). I have moral disagreements with how Meta operates, and would prefer to not use any of their products.
It's a personal goal of mine to
It's not so much WhatsApp that bothers me, but Meta, the company that produces it. You can read up on Meta's track record online – there's even an entire dedicated wikipedia page about it – but I'll highlight some of my own concerns here.
My personal experience working in "big tech" led me to work directly with
a number of ex-Meta employees. I was shocked by the uncaring attitudes
that some of these people had developed towards privacy after working at
Meta. I really appreciated the steps my employer took to ensure that our
users' privacy was safeguarded, and was very happy to
It's not hard to find ethical scandals involving Meta. In 2019, Meta agreed to a $5 billion fine for their role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The case involved a firm gathering massive amounts of user data and using that to assist the campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal is the most well-known one, but according to whistleblower Sophie Zhang, Meta also turned a blind eye to uses of Facebook to disseminate policital propaganda in a number of smaller countries.
When confronted about Russian election interference in the US, Meta is said to have initially denied everything and not taking the allegations seriously. After eventually adding actual human community moderators and fact checkers, they announced in early 2025, just a few weeks before Trump would take office again, that they are getting rid of human fact-checkers.
I have personal beef with Meta. When I started dabbling in stand-up comedy I quickly found out that most of the Dutch open mic evenings in the Netherlands are advertised on a Facebook group. Like most content on Facebook, the group is only accessible to users with a Facebook account. I used to have one of those, but had deleted it back in 2011.
After months of hemming and hawing – I really didn't want to rejoin Facebook – I finally broke down and decided to make an account, purely to access the standup group. I told myself, as a compromise, I wouldn't add any friends on Facebook, and only use the account for accessing the group.
I used my real legal name as per Meta's requirements. I used my primary email address. I joined the standup group, and started looking at all the open mics being advertised there.
A few days later, I received an email from Meta. They claimed my account was somehow in violation of their "account integrity" guidelines. They asked me to complete a verification process to prove that I'm human – the kind where you take some videos of you moving your face in various directions. I dutifully complied with the process.
I then received an email from Meta that they judged that my use of their platform did not comply to their guidelines. They didn't mince words: they said their decision is final and they will not accept any further appeals. When attempting to access my account, the page even had a disclaimer that my only recourse may be to pursue legal actions in certain jurisdictions.
Although I actually felt pretty good about my odds of winning a lawsuit in which I would have to prove that I am a Real Human Who Really Exists, I wasn't all that keen on engaging in a legal battle with a huge corporation. I decided to drop the matter, and with it, for now, my ambition of doing standup in the Netherlands. I'm still looking for alternative avenues to find Dutch open mic nights.
If you've made it this far, thank you. Please consider talking to me over Signal instead of WhatsApp. Signal is run by a non-profit entity whose goal is simply to make secure messaging possible for everyone in a safe way. It supports itself with donations, rather than harvesting user data. It has all the same creature comforts that you might be used to, like phone calls, animated gifs, polls, statuses, etc.
I am not asking you to stop using WhatsApp entirely, and I totally understand it's annoying to switch ecosystems. I've been using both Signal and WhatsApp simultaneously for years.
It'll likely take you less time to install Signal on your phone than it did to read this page.
All my closest friends and family talk over Signal, often because they share my concerns over Meta. Come join our inner circle.