I take your privacy concerns, but WA is a godsend for tours with tour groups and family. It just saves so much effort in getting people together and organised. It gives no excuses for those who are always late. Moreover WA gives the wonderful opportunity to easily stay in touch with those whom you met on the tour. Your credit card company will gain more information than Meta.
2 Likes
This is such a good point. If you have a credit card, you’ve already given away much more information than WhatsApp.
2 Likes
The thing I find unsettling is that once you register for WA your phone number is used to allow every other WA user to see that you are available. Anyone who has you in their Contacts will see you, likely with a “Hey there! I am using WhatsApp” note. I got round this by using a second pay-as-you-go SIM. Once you have confirmed the PAYG number once, you never need that to use that number again, but it means you can maintain your privacy and only tell people you want how to contact you on WA. That said, WA was fantastically useful in a tour group situation, and ad-free as far as I could tell.
If you are going on an overseas tour you might well want a local SIM anyway for mobile data purposes, so that can give you a second phone number. I used Airalo. They seemed pretty good and had a good iOS App.
Is that true? The privacy settings in the app seem to suggest you can restrict that to the contacts of your choice (I chose my spouse only, making it effectively private).
1 Like
As @silbey mentioned, you can change your last seen and online settings:
- Tap Settings > Privacy.
- Tap Last seen and online.
- Choose Everyone, My Contacts, My Contacts Except…, or Nobody.
You can also amend but not remove ‘Hey There I Am Using WhatsApp?’ via Settings > Profile > About.
You will find some other preset options or you can type anything you want albeit limited to 130 characters.
Aha, maybe that has changed since I first registered. I’m fairly sure it was a problem at that time, I remember being surprised by it and Googling it at the time. But thanks for the info.
1 Like
Thanks, I know you can edit the “Hey There” message – and I have – but most people just leave it at the default. I reckon about half of my contacts show the default message.
1 Like
This is also quite interesting to know regarding read receipts particularly if you have turned them off. This will not disable read receipts for group chats and there is no way to turn those settings off:
https://faq.whatsapp.com/665923838265756/?cms_platform=iphone&helpref=platform_switcher
It may be useful in some circumstances but not others.
I have been using WhatsApp for years and see no indication that anyone is mining or tracking anything. I rarely if ever get spam messages or unwanted solicitations. The Apple Messages app, on the other hand, is like a leaky boat. My Messages account gets bombarded with spam and advertising almost daily.
While spam and other junk direct communications are a part of online life unfortunately, my concerns about Meta’s mining and tracking are more focused on ad targeting, content recommendation algorithms, behavior tracking, device profiling, AI training, dynamic pricing in ecommerce, and our evergrowing personal information dossiers held by social media, data brokers, advertising networks, and countless other companies and organizations.
Yes, that’s a long list. But since it is impossible to completely decouple from online services without living like a Luddite these days, I try to compartmentalize and obscure my activities as much as possible. Sometimes, though, the tradeoff between convenience and privacy tilts towards using something like WhatsApp, at least for a brief period.
My views on this intensified after my state passed laws requiring companies to disclose their data holdings to users on request. Amazon and Google, of course, were shocking but even the dossier Apple keeps about me was surprisingly extensive.
1 Like
Believe me, I am not defending Meta’s predatory policies! I don’t use Facebook or any other social media platform. I’m simply saying that, as a regular WhatsApp user, I see no evidence of any of the downsides often associated with the use of Meta’s products. WhatsApp works really well; and more importantly, almost everyone I know uses it, so there’s a huge convenience factor.
As to the use of an ESIM for travel, you might find that they’re only for data and not SMS; this is what I found using Airalo. So you’re best bet may indeed be to use your primary line to sign up for WhatsApp, then restrict using the privacy settings (both system-wide and in WhatsApp) which contacts will see presence and status, and which are potentially shared with Meta for matching.
I did this very recently to keep in touch with my mother in Turkey while she was on an Android device that she was able to purchase at reasonable cost. Sometimes you just have to make these accommodations, honestly. It is not usually my choice to use WhatsApp and, in fact, the introduction of RCS support to iOS actually ends up being a net benefit for cagy people like me because the experience is much closer to SMS/MMS texting where people can’t learn any more about you than they already know through the meatspace social graph. JMO.
1 Like
Meta almost certainly already has your phone number as it’s pretty much guaranteed that some other person who has your number has shared their contacts with Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp. I say this as someone who does actually use a secondary eSIM for WhatsApp. But I’m under no illusions that it’s particularly effective at keeping my info out of Meta’s grasp.
1 Like
Yes, unfortunately other people, including people one is not particularly close to, can have a large impact on one’s privacy. Granting contact list access to a social media company has far-reaching effects, as does, as I mentioned earlier, tagging and posting photos of tour group members.
That’s why I think protecting privacy requires a layered approach. No one defense is enough these days. Plus the ways our information is abused now goes way beyond unwanted emails and phone calls. Here is one very revealing news story that has stayed with me since it was written a few years ago:
…a company called Sift, whose proprietary scoring system tracks 16,000 factors for companies like Airbnb and OkCupid. “Sift judges whether or not you can be trusted,” he wrote, “yet there’s no file with your name that it can produce upon request.”
As of this summer, though, Sift does have a file on you, which it can produce upon request. I got mine, and I found it shocking: More than 400 pages long, it contained all the messages I’d ever sent to hosts on Airbnb; years of Yelp delivery orders; a log of every time I’d opened the Coinbase app on my iPhone. Many entries included detailed information about the device I used to do these things, including my IP address at the time.
3 Likes
Thinking about use cases like the original poster’s a little more, if privacy and tracking is a major concern for international travel, and you’re already probably spending a few thousand dollars to take the trip, you probably can get a decent secondary phone with a short-term calling plan for around $200, all-in.
For example, a used iPhone XR can be had for around 150 USD on Backmarket.com, will run iOS 18.x, and supports eSIMs and physical SIMs. Add a month of basic voice and data service for your region of travel, and you’re in the neighborhood of $200. Sure, I don’t like spending “extra” either, but if privacy is a very high priority, $200 may not be a lot of money in the context of the whole trip.
3 Likes
Is this more than just SMS spam from the fact that your phone number is likely well known?
Most of my unwanted messages are either generic spam or advertising from companies I’ve done business with. The weirdest is that I still get frequent advertising messages from Thailand, which I visited only once eight years ago.
I concur. I’ve used it and I’ve never experienced a problem. I just don’t trust Meta corporation and I’m afraid that they may be doing things that haven’t yet become public, or that they may change their policies in the future without notice.
To be fair, this applies to any and all corporations, but Meta (and Google) have an established history of lying to the public, especially about their privacy and censorship policies, so I always assume the worst when talking about them.
This is in contrast to Apple who does not have this history. Apple products have had bugs, but they were quickly fixed after discovery and there has been no evidence that the bugs were deliberate. So when they make a claim about prvacy, I’m inclined to believe their claims until I discover facts that prove otherwise.
1 Like
When you’re right, you’re right. I don’t trust them either; but I do find WhatsApp very useful, especially in India, where I now live. Almost everyone here uses WhatsApp for texting and phone calls. Very few people use email at all. I agree that Apple can be trusted, but the Messages app is a distant second to WhatsApp in the text messaging department.
What’sApp primarily exists because it mines the information it acquires and sells it directly to advertisers:
1 Like