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.