Makes me think I should go and learn how to programme a messaging App....

Facebook already has their own messaging app, but there was outcry when Facebook harvested people's address book - something that Whatsapp has so far got away with.

Interesting analysis in the Register - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02...our_phonebook/

Basically by buying Whatsapp, Facebook now has your address book.

This is facebook taking the competition out of the market

The appeal of whatsapp was that they are not Facebook where your privacy is totally ignored. The best apps are those where you can have a small set of contacts and dont need to be on some huge thing like Facebook who couldnt care.

Viber is a good option until Facebook take them out of the market also.

Somebody has made extra $3 billion just like that. The offer has changed to $19 billion.

Everyone Who Thinks Facebook Is Stupid To Buy WhatsApp For $19 Billion Should Think Again ...

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-f...hatsapp-2014-2

Well, they have a certain obligation to their shareholders to make money from this 19 billion $ investment - so it's safe to assume that no matter what they may promise now, they'll try everything to turn this into a gigantic money-making machine - by selling your personal information and that of your contacts, by selling your location data, by using your message contents for targeted advertising etc etc

I still have a Facebook profile that I need to log on to Spotify and some news sites but I don't use FB itself anymore. And I've just deleted whatsapp - my wife and I switched to BBM. And there's been a coordinated switch to Swisscom IO from my friends and colleagues, so I'll keep that installed as well.

Or https://threema.ch/en/index.html
Or https://www.telegram.org/

Well, Whatsapp is already a money factory. Out of the 400 million users probably a good 300 million are subscribers (who signed up after they changed from a once off to a yearly 1 USD subscription fee). Thats 300.000.000 USD yearly revenue - not bad for a company of ca 50 people. They grow rapidly, Marc Zuckerberg optimistically predicts one billion users in a few years. Marc Zuckerberg wants to own those one billion users.

Anyway this is a way for FB to secure income from all the teens who leave Facebook and do their socializing over whatsapp instead, biding their time until said teens quit college and want to keep in touch with old friends and stalk their exes = enter Facebook.

Nothing will change in terms of service, no ads or Facebook login, that would kill the app.

Facebook is a long term thinker. They plan to stick around forever. End of the line, like google. You won't see another house hold name search engine like google, this is it. In order to do this, Facebook needs to keep buying up the competition until they own all social media - at this stage they want to own the people, not necessarily secure short term revenue. This was the case with the purchase of instagram, but unlike Instagram the purchase of Whatsapp makes business sense too, it won't take them long to make their money back.

I just did some research and Telegram seems to be the way to go.

I'm looking for alternatives to whatsapp because I really dislike the whole 'we own you nothing is private' garbage.

Hope this link works - How FB will use whatsapp to spy on you

"Whatsapp logs your IP, browser info, URL of the site you were on before and the one you're moving to. This will now be shared with Facebook."

Jeez! Not if there's an easy, free alternative!

(I'm not technically-minded enough to know if that's all true. Seems about right.)

WhatsApp seems to have been broken most of the day. I blame FaceBook.

Telegram is Russian. If that means anything.


Just sayin'.

Telegram isn't bad but I don't like that you can't turn off the "last seen" stamp so you can see when each contact was last online all at once. TMI. I can imagine they'll be improving their site as it becomes more popular.

As the news broke and following my earlier post, I decided to install all alternatives on all family (and close friends) phones and then use them in parallel to see which suits us all best.

Pool is about 15-ish people, mix of iphones and androids. Tested WeChat, LINE, VIBER, KIK. Few days in now, pretty much all are steering towards the VIBER app. Telegram has been used a few times and then deleted by most. KIK, WeChat and Line did not see any love. If this keeps up, we'll likely remove all WhatsApp instances altogether - keeping them (albeit silent) for the time being to sniff for friends who are on the lookout to switch. Anyone know how to broadcast to all WhatsApp contacts "hey, we are moving to VIBER"? LOL

VIBER also supports some old Nokia symbian phones (E72), used by friends abroad - a welcome addition.

What is your journey so far?

Sticking to whatsapp

What has whatsapp got to do with the browser or URLs..., AFAIK on iOS the app would not be able to get browser info anyway.


Telegram will store all the IP information as well. It also stores your messages centrally on it's servers, something Whatsapp doesn't do at the moment. Even if Telegram say everything is encrypted, they could have a backdoor or they may be forced into providing a backdoor to a government agency.


I'm also suspicious of Telegram's founders saying they don't want to make any money or run the app as a business.


I will stick to Whatsapp for now, and see about moving to something else if facebook start changing Whatsapp for the worse.

Viber is owned by Japanese shopping site Rakuten (owners of Play.com). I imagine they are mining data as well.

I will stick with whatsapp for now.

Oh dear... you'd think the cartoonist behind this would have spent a moment thinking about the history of such imagery...

The thing is most of the $19bn is in Facebook shares, not cash, so it doesn't matter to Facebook what the figure in dollars is, rather the percentage of the company they have given to the Whatsapp owners and staff.

$4 billion is in cash. That's still a hell of a lot of cash for a bit of code ... and, of course, 450 million users around the world (many of whom are apparently going to give all their personal data to Viber now, as well instead).

Apparently he has ... now.

Next round: February 8th 2021 one has to agree (physically clicking) facebook/whatsapp sharing data. Sounds fair LOL, at least honest? But I'll be dammed it I actually AGREE to this.
Some sources say, this doesn't count in the EC. Then why would everybody still have to agree? Plus, we are not EC.

So I tried Signal and Telegram (yeah, I know it's Russian). It's pretty impressive I must say: While with very few exceptions all my contacts are on whatsapp, there are only a handful of them on Signal and/or Telegram!

I deinstalled whatsapp back when facebook bought it. Later - them claiming, blocking all facebook connections is good enough - I went back on it. Also because it's pretty clear that anybody who has my number in their contacts and uses whatsapp/facebook ....... you know what I mean.
Also I'm not on any of those popular social media thingies, whatsapp is the only thing because most my friends are all over the blooming globe and it is oh so convenient to still keep in touch closely. On a personal level, not by scrolling through what they had for breakfast etc.

Google hast much more knowledge about me, although they probably wonder about "my" algorithm as it makes no sense at all.

For some reason, facebook is covered in lawsuits. Why now? While most users knew what's happening, the US-government only found out now?! Or - what's in it for them at this point of time?

However. Will you - or have you already - click agree and carry on using whatsapp? I will inform my closest friends and try to convince them to change/add Signal, then place my first and only status message on whatsapp, telling everyone I can be found on Signal after Feb. 8th.
I'm not saying, this is the way to secure my data. It's more a refusal to be forced to hand it all over. And - as I said at the beginning - at least it's honest. I kind of agree that I don't have a right to get a completely free service.