Is it (still) worth trying to switch my family and friends from WhatsApp to Signal? (Read all of it, please.)

ramble81, 9 months ago

I love Signal, but I’ve had two main issues: video chat sucks, I haven’t gotten a good clean call with it yet and have to look at other options. Also transferring messages between apps or phones is a pain. The application does not support backup from Android and restore to iOS.

MrMouseNCrow, 7 months ago

Well. I think it depends on how strong your concern and commitment to you and yours family’s privacy is. In my case is kind of the same story, the people doesn’t really care about privacy and WhatsApp is the mainly used messaging app. But I convinced them, here’s how:

The first thing that’s important to notice is that you had the same mentality as your relatives in some point, but that changed and there was a reason for it. If you find the way to communicate them that reason and you make them feel what you felt when you started to care about your privacy then there are good chances that they not only install Signal to talk to each other but also to actively care about their privacy. This approach could even potentially spread the behavior, that is, they seek to make their close ones with the importance of privacy.

There might be some issues, specially with the oldest members of your family, because sometimes for them is difficult to adapt to a new tech tool and they might not even be willig to try. However, if you first convince the other members and they support you, it may become easier to get it with the oldest ones.

For me there’s no price for the privacy in the age we live, so I would not give up and do not so in the task of raising awareness in my acquaintances about the importance of protecting this invaluable treasure. (That’s also why I’m posting this :D).

So, if you decide that you want to try it, I wish the best of the lucks for you.

CoachDom, 9 months ago

My situation was that I removed all my social media accounts at the same time when Meta took over WhatsApp - I decided enough is enough. I switched to signal and lost contact with whoever didn’t have Signal. Luckily, my family and my friends care about the privacy, so my closest circle made a switch or at least created Signal account as an additional messenger.

ayon, 9 months ago

Be the change you wanna see in the world. Start by ditching WhatsApp yourself, or at least aggressively reducing your usage of it in favor of Signal. Let your friends and family know that you’re only reachable on Signal now and see what happens. You don’t have to ask them to switch; just to use Signal if they wanna contact you.

artaxthehappyhorse, 9 months ago

Agreed. The more people who have it installed the better. Eventually certain users will realize all their contacts have both and delete Whatsapp

cambionn, 9 months ago

Yes. WhatsApp metadata is not E2EE, Signal’s is. So while Zuck can’t read your message, he knowns when you’re online, who you talk to, how often you talk to them, where you are when chatting, who are contacts in hour phone, etc. Honestly that E2EE is there more as a fake safety feeling than to protect you. Not even speaking about the closed source E2EE that you can’t check they don’t store a copy of keys from or scan before encrypting. Neither I would put above Meta.

And even if those people still use WhatsApp with others, if they don’t with you Meta looses a lot of data about you.

I would suggest not asking people to switch, but just telling people you don’t have WhatsApp anymore and they can reach you on Signal or send an SMS. If you keep it on the side while asking to switch barely anyone will. If you switch, well… after a year pretty much all my friends and family had switched, last few sending SMS. Sending photos en having group chats tend to get people to come over slowely one by one once they can’t fall back on WhatsApp. And while SMS isn’t encrypted, it also isn’t full of trackers. So for most regular people, they are better off as trackers are a bigger threat to them than a possible man-in-the-middle reading your messages.

And in my experience, if you bring it with some tact and put the issue with you (i.e. I’m the crazy privacy guy") instead of them (“i.e. you shouldn’t use WhatsApp. You are stupid for not caring about privacy”) you won’t loose friend or get into fights about it.

inspxtr, 9 months ago

I think it’s worth doing. One thing about whatsapp is that you can turn on e2ee, if you haven’t, for those who choose not to switch with you but you still want contact with.

ayon, 9 months ago

I think e2ee is always on in WhatsApp. You don’t need to turn on anything. You may be confusing it with Messenger or Telegram.

inspxtr, 9 months ago

gotcha, havent use whatsapp for a while. Good to know. Even with e2ee enabled, what types of data are still known by FB/meta? Like social graphs and such?

ayon, 9 months ago

You better believe that any metadata that can be syphoned by Meta is, that includes profile info, social graphs, who’s calling/messaging who, when, and for how long. AFAIK only message content is e2ee.

Sucuk, 9 months ago

For example, who you texted, when and where you texted, for how long you texted etc etc
those are not encrypted.

CameronDev, 9 months ago

It’s really only worth it if you or your family need the privacy features. It’s probably gonna be an uphill battle unless you can convince them of the privacy benefits. Even if you do convince them, Signal isn’t 100% feature identical to WhatsApp, so that will annoy your family when a feature they like is missing. It could also be looking for a useful feature that signal has that WhatsApp doesn’t, and see if that is a viable selling point. For me, it was group calls. When Hangouts broke group calls it was very easy to convince my family to switch to signal.

poissonDistribution, 9 months ago

Same as you. I’m still using telegram for groups, but signal has became absolutely useless. I also feel like that developers made it heavier by adding support for animated emoticons and stickers and dumbshit just to attract more users (it probably didn’t worked). Rn I prefer Session when it comes to privacy and encryption. It uses a blockchain-based decentralized network which grants a great amount of layers of privacy.

philip_the3rd, 9 months ago

I also live in a country where WhatsApp is the messaging app almost everybody uses. You won’t be able to get all of your relatives, friends and co-workers on Signal, so I’d suggest you start small - get SOME people onboard, make it very clear you’re gonna be using WhatsApp for work-related stuff only, see what happens. Besides, Signal has its quirks, too - switching phones and backing up will lead to a lot of frustration and its devs proudly state that “more options is never the answer”. It’ll sadly remain a niche app for activists and the privacy-inclined, I fear. But if you really care about privacy, you should ditch Telegram ASAP.