Bad news: Advertisements are coming to WhatsApp. Like we need more advertising on the Internet?
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. WhatsApp once was a successful freeware and cross-platform encrypted messaging and Voice over IP (VoIP) product that treated its customers like real human beings. Then the company was bought out by Facebook for approximately US$19.3 billion. Since then, the encrypted service has been abused by various groups. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#Reception_and_criticism for the details.
Unlike some of its competitors, WhatsApp is not open source software. Its source code is proprietary, known only to the programmers at Facebook’s WhatsApp division. Nobody else knows what is happening inside the application. It may already be spying on users in typical Facebook fashion in the same manner as most other Facebook applications. We simply don’t know. Unfortunately, WhatsApp vice-president Chris Daniels has now confirmed with Outlook India that the messaging service’s opposition to ads would soon come to an end.
You can read more in an article by Williams Pelegrin in the Android Authority web site at: https://www.androidauthority.com/whatsapp-ads-facebook-920793/.
As for me, I think I will continue to use the ad-free, open source Signal service. No ads. No spying. Fully secured by encryption. See https://www.signal.org/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_%28software%29 for more information about a truly secure and ad-free private encrypted communications app for Android, iOS, Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.
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Categories: Current Affairs, Encryption, Online Privacy & Security
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