In the years since WhatsApp launched, I haven’t seen any marketing at all in the U.S.A. That’s changed in 2025 as Facebook/Meta has started promoting the messaging app with a new ad campaign (1) (2). Personally, I deleted the app over 10 years ago because it was obviously designed for enshittification from the beginning and that abusive business plan became more obvious when Facebook bought Whatsapp in 2014. The new ad campaign mainly talks about private messages being private and how they’re all “end-to-end encrypted”, but end-to-end encryption doesn’t mean a whole lot when one company owns both ends.
Elon Musk told his 250 million X followers that they shouldn’t trust WhatsApp, because parent company Meta, exports data from the messaging platform for targeted advertising. Meta and Facebook are going to deny that, and there’s no proof either way, but Whatsapp did change their policies in 2021 to allow sharing data.
There are a lot of reasons not to trust Whatsapp though.
There’s no proof
The biggest red flag when it comes to privacy and security in tech products is when the company that makes the product doesn’t allow you to reproduce or audit its functions in order to verify that the product does what the company says it does. There isn’t really much regulation for tech products, so they can pretty much say what they want to say. That’s how we get companies like Apple who spew out “reality distortion field” claims and made-up buzzwords all the time. No one is held accountable because no one is allowed to audit the claims.
Closed source
That’s a factor of “closed source” software where the exact functions of tech products are hidden due to businesses wanting to keep their secrets away from competitors. That sounds like a good idea for competition, but it also allows companies to secretly do things that they probably shouldn’t be doing… such as abusing users.
Open-source software is the opposite. This type of code is published on the internet for anybody to read through, audit, reproduce, test, critique, and contribute to. We even have standards bodies like the W3C and IETF that openly develop and evolve protocols that anyone can use and contribute to in a democratic manner.
Centralized for dictator-style control
Another aspect of closed-source tech and sometimes even open-source tech is a structure for centralized control. This is when there is one server or location that everything else depends on. No one else is allowed to run the system. No one else is allowed to connect to the system without authorization. No one else is allowed to contribute to the system or add democratic features. It’s basically a dictatorship where only one entity gets to decide how everything works and you’re a slave to whatever their decisions are. That type of system is known to always become corrupt someday no matter how benevolent the dictator may be at one point or another.
Use open standards instead
The smarter thing to do, especially when it comes to personal and business communications, is to depend on open standards. We built the internet on open standard protocols for the big reason of encouraging democratic collaboration and to avoid dictator-style control and corruption. I guess a lot of people don’t understand the advantage of avoiding becoming slaves to a single dictatorship. Anyway, the IETF has specifications for several completely open messaging protocols like SMTP and XMPP. SMTP is the most popular messaging protocol anywhere on the internet and it’s completely open for anyone to use. If you don’t recognize SMTP, it’s one of the protocols for email transfer.
It’s very easy to make your own fully open, democratic, and self-controlled SMTP email server with lots of extra security and end-to-end encryption in a very low-cost manner as well. You could host maybe 10,000 people on a server with 1Gb of RAM that might cost $10/year. See: Using Delta Chat with Chatmail servers for decentralized, open, secure, private messaging and 10 Ways Delta Chat is Better than WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.
Unfortunately there are no advertisements or marketing budgets for open protocols, so gullible people are easily steered away so that they can be taken advantage of.
Also see:
- How to tell if it’s trustworthy
- Stop being naive when it comes to things like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc.
- Why are we still using instant messaging apps at all?
- The smartest messaging method is not a segregated mess of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, SMS, Slack, Teams, Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, etc.
- 10 Ways Delta Chat is Better than WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram