whatsapp – A Scott Odyssey

In my part 1 of My Great Social Media Purge of 2019 i outlined my objectives with assessing my use case of each social media platform I use. Part 2 covered Twitter. Part 3 covered Reddit. Part 4 covers Linkedin. Now part 5 is Whatsapp, or as I call it “the chat app i am forced to use since everyone left AOL IM”.

I thought about WhatsApp when I first started this excersise. It still only comes in fourth on my list. Partly because I was procrastinating. My assesment with WhatsApp is simple. I dont want anyone to know who i talk to. I am not doing anything wrong or illegal. Neither to my knowledge is anyone i am talking to. That is imiterial though. I have a right to privacy and I am excersising that right. Plain and simple.

Not wanting people to know who I talk to and using WhatsApp is challenging. Whatsapp does collect tons of meta data about your messages and calls. They allegidly are not able to read the body of the messages. Just the metadata. The question then becomes do care that WhatsApp has any metadata on me? More specifically the question could be how bad is it that they have metadata that i called my mom? Or my wife? Since lets face it they are the main people i use it for. I also chat or call people internationally with it for work. I can say I dont care about work linkage on WhatsApp however I probably should. I do care about everyone else I chat with on whatsapp. It’s mainly innocuous yet the linkage is still there in collected meta data. Will it likely impact me in my every day life that Facebook has that linkage? Probibly not. The fact they can learn a whole bunch about me because of it is creepy.

Practically speaking I know I will not get my local parents Organization for my kids school to stop using whatsapp. That means I have to live with the metadata collection.with. Or choose not to be in the conversation. I want to be in the conversation and there are too many ad hoc chats with friends and coworkers using Whatsapp that there would be a noticible loss of comunication and colaberation with several circles of people if I delete the app. Likely moreso than any other tool I am using and rewviewing.

To minimize my exposure to Whatsapp I aim to move as much of that conversation over to Signal or Telegram. Preferably Signal. I haven’t been very successful so far. Some work friends use Telegram. I got some family on Signal. The vast majority of people still use Whatsapp. I am going to make much more of an effort on this going forward.

The verdict on Whatsapp (For now) is sadly I will keep it. I will say its keep for as long as I have to, however lets face it that will likely be a while. I blame everyone else I chat with.

With my kids in school apparently that means more messaging apps I need to have on my phone. Last year things were simple. Both of my kids classes used WhatsApp. Each class had a group and we would chat with parents. It was pretty useful. I am not the hugest fan of WhatsApp since Facebook collect meta-data however it’s not terrible for that specific use case.

I personally use Telegram as my first choice of messaging app. I like the secure features as well as the ability to chat on multiple devices if I want. It’s not tethered to my phone. WhatsApp has a computer app but you need your phone nearby. I can’t use it on my iPad at all. Having just those two apps would’ve been manageable however the number of applications are use for Chad has proliferated.

There is messages for apple messages and SMS. And there are the two different chat apps I use at work. I also have signal since it supposed to be pretty secure some good like telegram however not many people use it so it just sits there. I still have Skype. I do not use Skype for texting really anymore however I do use it to make phone calls now and again.

The latest wrinkle is both girls are in new classes this year and each class has decided to use a different app for communicating with the parents. The benefit of at least one of them is that the teacher communicate back-and-forth with us now. Using WhatsApp that didn’t happen however it wasn’t a problem since we could simply email the teacher. I haven’t tried my other daughters app that was recommended. I got the notice to provide might details to get a login tonight. That’s pond me wanting to write about the now nine different messaging applications nuts on my phone.

On one hand getting up to the minute updates from school is useful. Also being able to send the teacher a last minute notice is pretty useful too. But nine apps? That’s getting a little much even for someone like myself who actually likes technology. I’m not even counting email applications in that number.