You know, I don't care about the changes to the privacy policy at all. I tried to move to an alternative messenger for years but I was never able to convince enough people. Now that there's enough momentum I tried again and every person I care about was willing to move. Let's see if we can use the network effect for our own good for once.

We've been down this path before.

We were told nothing would change.

Oh wait, the time of last login will be shared with facebook family of companies? Despite this blog post showing no sharing icons at all - they ARE sharing and now lying about it by not showing a single icon to reflect this sharing.

Oh wait, we need your phone number for 2FA? Sure. Bam - now you've given us permission to spam you! They lied about that.

Check out signal and get away from the lies. This blog post is such a good example of it, all the things not showing as not shared are probably SHARED! So despite EVERY icon saying nothing is shared, they no doubt are pumping your phone number over to Facebook family of companies.

They are trying to do the fake apple privacy label thing - but only including non-sharing labels, not the sharing labels.

Totally disgusting. I'm signing up to signal today and pushing hard for my network to switch.

Now if only signal used go or something lighter weight instead of a monster java stack they could probably scale a lot better.

Facebook guy tells us that the changes are harmless and that there is nothing to worry about. Nothing to see here I guess.

Amazing what some internal koolaid can do to you (well more than this,it's really probably greed). Please rethink critically the ethics of your employer.

+1

A Facebook employee making claims about privacy or ethics makes me immediately suspicious of those claims.

It seemed to imply that from Feb, metadata would now be shared with Facebook (I know, probably was anyway), and a lot of people took a dim view of that. (esp. those that paid for it originally)

I think a lot of horses have bolted, but I'm sure there will be plently left once the gate is shut.

From the link you supplied: "WhatsApp does not share your contacts with Facebook"

Wouldn't it be better to just say: "WhatsApp does not share your contacts." or even better "WhatsApp doesn't store any of your contacts especially the ones who doesn't even use WhatsApp"?

Too late. When there is a mandatory requirement to share data with Facebook that is a hard no regardless of the details. I'd be happy to pay or get ads within reason, but to monetize my privacy, no way.

My user experience on Signal has been excellent so far, family switched without difficulty.

To me that was never the problem. The problem is joining data that doesn't need to be joined.

So your rational is: since Facebook was already mining your conversation metadata, people shouldn't be leaving. Did I capture that accurately? Seems pretty flimsy. You're right though, people should have left a long time ago.

That is not what he said.

Pedantry aside, isn't it? In a thread about the backlash to whatsapp changes, Op said "it's not what you think it is!!!"

The point is, this happened to be a watershed moment. Whether the conditions (mining metadata) were met years ago or in a week or two from now is irrelevant.

Ask your bosses why they're ok with forcing through changes that nobody wants and repeatedly lying to users

No one wants? But the customer wants them. It just so happens to be that you're not the customer.

How can you still work at Facebook with a clear conscience?