Private Communications: WhatsApp

I’ve written before about deleting Facebook and WhatsApp. They are two of my most popular articles here on Medium. But today, as WhatsApp unveils new measures to help them share your information with the Facebook HQ which has owned it since 2014, we consider the grim reality: is there actually any alternative? Yes and no.

I still believe that for normal 1-to-1 text messages, the old SMS system is still the best. It is not run by a single company, so has no single point of failure. It is not run commercially except by your mobile phone network, and you pay for each message, even if you have an “unlimited” allocation included in your monthly fee. Just because they are included in a bundle does not make them free.

The problem with SMS, of course, is that photos cannot be included, and the lesser-used MMS is still astronomically expensive. Almost no UK mobile providers bundle free MMS in a contract, and all of them charge through the eyes on a per-message basis. So MMS is not a realistic alternative.

WhatsApp these days also does multi-person voice and video calls, but there is much more competition there: you can always use Skype, FaceTime, Zoom or any number of other services.

Unless you and everyone you know are heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem (in which case iMessage seems to be a no-brainer) you still need to choose an app which lets you share photos and text with your siblings, kids, grandparents, grandchildren, parents, friends, colleagues and everyone in between.

WhatsApp is the only system which is used and understood by every single one of these groups in our family. It has somehow become a monopoly and yet it is not regulated by the normal rules which apply to SMS and mobile network providers. I know that if I delete WhatsApp, I will be left out of so many loops and become a kind of pariah in all of my social circles.

So I have resisted deleting WhatsApp. Notice that I am not bothered about privacy in the sense of law enforcement getting hold of my messages. In decades gone by, the postal service and telephone services were never securely private. Nobody complained that the police and legal system could access their mail or tap their phones: this idea is a new problem, and not one that I experience directly.

Were I a celebrity or public figure, I would have turned on 2FA on all my services. Yet most of them seem unaware of the risks and are repeatedly hacked and exposed. Strangely enough, SMS cannot be hacked in the same way because there is no single provider or single point to attack. You need my SIM card to spoof SMS, which is much harder to obtain than a mere username and password. And yes, there are ways to hijack a SIM card, but they are not as widely exploited as password phishing.

So for most of us, as with so many other things in life, the old ways are the best. SMS just works, and I can always stoop to email if I want to share photos with a group of relatives. They all have gmail accounts now so it is easy to share albums on Google Photos.

So although WhatsApp would seem to have a virtual monopoly, there are many more alternatives than there were when it first became popular around ten years ago. The world moves onwards, and a change to WhatsApp T&Cs is not the big shock it might have been even two or three years ago.

They tell me that the next generation of kids are all on SnapChat, Instagram and TikTok so I imagine that this WhatsApp privacy story is more of an issue for the current parents of schoolchildren than for other groups. Nevertheless, every time a story like this bubbles up, it gives us an opportunity to take stock.

I can think of many advantages to accidentally forgetting to accept this current round of changes. Just think how much more time you might have to do stuff that actually matters. You can always pick up the phone and use your voice, if there is something really interesting to share.

Update: And this is why Signal is even worse. Some other stories: I Really Did Delete Facebook and Sigh: Time To Delete WhatsApp.