My niece says I should get WhatsApp to stay in touch while I’m in Europe. Having quit Facebook and Instagram this year, I loathe the idea of installing this. Do I hold my nose and do it?
@macgenie Do it! WhatsApp is nice in that Facebook has started to destroy the interface, but it's not too far gone yet. It's very convenient!
@macgenie When I travel abroad, I just get a local SIM and add that number to FaceTime. That connects me to the network, and any devices on FT can then see/respond to those messages. You can also SMS folks who are not on FaceTime - but, really, who would you want to communicate that isn't on FT? ;-) Once you're back home, you can remove that number from your account and things are back to normal.
@nitinkhanna @macgenie It’s Facebook-owned so have zero expectation of privacy. But we used it in Spain for communicating with our AirBNB hosts - it was convenient and ubiquitous as an alternative to text messaging. I deleted it when I got home. 🙂
@Cheri apparently, it gives Zuck nightmares because they were forced to annouce end-to-end encryption to compete with other offerings in the market and so he can't steal all our data through it. He still sees all the metadata, contacts lists, listens in on video and audio calls (which have never been promised to be encrypted far as I know), and sees all the Status photos people post on there (stolen Instagram stories feature). // @macgenie
@macgenie Whatsapp is not nearly as bad. It doesn't need any personal details apart from a phone number and everything is end to end encrypted. I'm sure Facebook will get some tracking and ads in there at some point but they haven't yet.
@macgenie Someone I know has been trying to get me to get it too, but I just can't bring myself to do it. I'm happier being out of the FaceBook world.
@macgenie personally I prefer Signal, which is end-to-end encrypted, without being owned by Facebook
@macgenie I continued to use Apple Messages during my recent Europe trip. The end-to-end encryption is most welcome. Also not being owned by FB. I also have a Signal account for people who want to contact me through other means.
@macgenie I’d try to avoid it, while you still can. It has been unreliable for me. There used to be no Mac app; the currently existing one is bad (e.g. shift+return instead of option+return for line breaks). It used to have limited file sharing abilities (e.g. no calendars). I thought the default chat background was horrible. Unfortunately, I eventually gave up my resistance due to too many Android users and not having a standard for group chats.
