With the recent buy of WhatsApp messenger by Facebook (Reuters article), a lot of my friends are concerned by the enormous amount of data that Facebook can lay is hands on in the future.
Some of them are because of privacy concerns not using the Facebook app so that Facebook isn't able to search through your personal data on your mobile.
WhatsApp that is able to access your contacts, dial phone numbers, send SMS, knows your location, can search for other accounts on your device and many more 'features' is quite some value for Facebook and other companies that are interested in that information. Nowadays WhatsApp is free of commercial advertisements, but will that remain in the future? Since Facebook makes money with these ads, probably not. But that is just my speculation. My concern is more in the amount of privacy related data that Facebook is able to gather, knowing that Facebook will use it.
An alternative then? Well, you might look at Telegram (https://telegram.org/). With a lot of features also on security level like message encryption from end-to-end, the ability to 'self destruct' a message on both ends of a device gives a user a lot more control. And no advertisements, just like WhatsApp.
Read for yourself the other nice features of Telegram, decide if you want to switch to it, until Facebook will buy it and we have to look for an alternative again...
| CREDIT: REUTERS/DADO RUVIC |
WhatsApp that is able to access your contacts, dial phone numbers, send SMS, knows your location, can search for other accounts on your device and many more 'features' is quite some value for Facebook and other companies that are interested in that information. Nowadays WhatsApp is free of commercial advertisements, but will that remain in the future? Since Facebook makes money with these ads, probably not. But that is just my speculation. My concern is more in the amount of privacy related data that Facebook is able to gather, knowing that Facebook will use it.
An alternative then? Well, you might look at Telegram (https://telegram.org/). With a lot of features also on security level like message encryption from end-to-end, the ability to 'self destruct' a message on both ends of a device gives a user a lot more control. And no advertisements, just like WhatsApp.
Read for yourself the other nice features of Telegram, decide if you want to switch to it, until Facebook will buy it and we have to look for an alternative again...
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| Telegram logo from their website. |
