signal.

The issue is getting all your contacts to use it. Works for about half of mine and it's ready to go for the rest when facebook do something foul that pisses them off. This is a good backstop that counterbalances all the reasons facebook want to do something evil to those users. (Eg break the encryption, put ads in the messages, provide the NSA with a backdoor etc etc.) "Mark, if we do that, we lose most whatsapp users to signal by the end of the week."

Signal is great. It costs nothing to have next to whatsapp on your phone. The desktop client is significantly better. Most of what is good about whatsapp they literally bought from signal.

Somebody always owns something, that's capitalism. But I would argue that Whatsapp works differently than FB, it's really just a communication tool, it doesn't manipulate you through a "feed".

And what's to say Facebook isn't harvesting all the phone numbers, contacts and the social graph and feeding it into FB and FB's ads? Especially since Whatsapp does not seem to be monetized in any way.

There’s no need to speculate on this. WhatsApp officially declared some years ago that it will share communication metadata with Facebook. So even though the message content (being E2E encrypted) isn’t shared with Facebook, everything else about one’s messages is.