almost. You don't have privacy in either case. Case in the article is the company is sharing data with US agencies only.

The only government doing the right thing on this front is France. They contribute and host their own Matrix instance for government use.

If you see countries like India, Brasil, Nigeria... They pretty much replaced their telephone infrastructure with Whatsapp. Like it or not, the telephone infra gives law enforcement access to all metadata, in some cases without a warrant, and allow wiretap with a warrant. Whatsapp gives both these powers to US agencies and not local ones. And thats what the UK have a problem with.