I don't think I'm ever going to be able to trust an entity--or a free app--that is ultimately controlled by Facebook.

This ^

Think “Facebook” not “WhatsApp”

yeah, my kneejerk reaction to the tweet was "Mark@FB has entered the chat"

Right, they guard the sanctity of your content fiercely. And make enormous bags of money off of your contact list, frequency and timing of contacts, awake timing, location, etc etc.

And even if you're in a country (only really Germany AFAIK) where the worst use of metadata for advertising is legally tricky... WhatsApp is the very definition of the fox guarding the henhouse. Do you really trust one of the largest data harvesters andy advertising marketplaces in the world to guard your data? Their business model literally depends on violating that trust. Do you honestly think that's a safe long term bet?

> the most privacy-respecting chat system for laypeople right now.

Sorry, but that has to be either Threema or Signal. WhatsApp is easy to use, but that's the only point it has. Ultimately, it's Facebook.

Unencrypted backups are bad, but this is arguably even worse: https://jorislacance.fr/blog/2021/04/16/whatsapp-tracking-2

(Discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26889139)

You know WhatsApp is Facebook right? I don't think there is a worse company to trust except maybe Google. :)

Didn't Apple just show us how brand names are basically meaningless? I am only concerned with their actions, not their owners.

They make an statement and this guy talks like he has their source code.

Opposite directions. If you put a clean shirt and a dirty shirt in a bag together, the dirty shirt can rub off it'd dirtiness on the clean one, but the cleanness can't rub off and make the dirty shirt clean.

I remember the terms of service change and I almost left the platform because of it. But you are also greatly mischaracterizing the change. It actually only allows those things in some pretty specific circumstances which are under the user's control (although that's still not ideal, of course).

I am only trying to convince WhatsApp that the stance they are taking here is the right one. Unless we give credit where it's actually due, what will be the incentive for any bigcorp to take any privacy-protecting actions?

WhatsApp refuses to take action against misinformation or political spammers. They understand that their products are being used to undermine democracy in the whole of Latin America and they refuse to implement one spam detector.

There are large scale implications to these "privacy" features.

Totally. Facebook and their subsidiaries are the gold-standard for privacy.