Re:Getting Started with Signal
by Angostura on Monday January 11, 2021 @02:16PM
(#25734629)
I rate them differently- I can use Facebook and supply minimal real personal information. WhatsApp by contrast demands full access to all my contacts whether they use WhatsApp or not
[ Parent
| on HN ]
You don't need to give permissions to contacts, you can add a contact manually in WhatsApp.
That has not been true in forever on either iOS or Android, if it ever was.
It is possible to reply to numbers bot listed in your contacts; and apparently it is possible to initiate chats with numbers by using a web api which triggers a platform specific app action.
But you’d be left with phone numbers as identifiers, and at most the user’s self description which is sometimes they name and sometimes just something like “xxx”