
Why I asked my friends to stop using WhatsApp and Telegram - mikro2nd
https://medium.com/@romaub/why-i-asked-my-friends-to-stop-using-whatsapp-and-telegram-e93346b3c1f0
======
roryisok
I'm curious to know how effective you were at converting your friends.

Last year, when Whatsapp announced they would be sharing customers mobile
number data with Facebook, I urged all of my friends to switch to telegram
instead of Whatsapp. the encryption is not as solid, but at the time I was
more concerned about Facebook's business practices, and was already using
Telegram to talk to family.

In theory, urging your friends to use a more secure protocol is the right
thing to do. They all become more secure, and everybody is safer. Win win.

In practice, what happens is most of them don't bother switching, because most
people just don't care, and you end up neatly cutting yourself off from
everyone. This was my experience at least. Only a handful of my friends signed
up to Telegram, and practically none of them uninstalled Whatsapp or even
stopped using it.

One year later I'm significantly out of the loop. I've missed a number of
social occassions because people forgot I don't use Whatsapp and sent out a
group message to everyone on it. I've had to resort to Facebook messenger to
get in touch with a number of people I used to talk to on Whatsapp.

Despite knowing what we know about the security of Whatsapp, despite their
shady business practices, despite whatever anti-user mischief Whats/Face will
likely try to pull next, I'm very tempted to sign back up again.

