Growing up, there were a couple of chat apps, but one reigned supreme: AIM. Use of AIM dwindled in the smartphone era though. They weren’t quick enough with a good mobile app that could improve upon the features of text messaging, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, or other competitors. AIM died as iMessage grew to prominence. It quickly resolved issues with low-quality images and videos in text messages and added your favorite chat features to text messaging. Over the years, it’s only gotten better. However, on the mobile side, it’s iOS-only. That means it’s only popular in one part of the world: North America, especially the United States. Most of the world runs on Android, and they largely use WhatsApp. They think the whole green bubble vs blue bubble thing is stupid. “Just download WhatsApp,” they say.
Yeah? Well that’s stupid.
I’m so tired of reading snarky op-eds claiming the whole iMessage problem is silly and we should all just use Meta’s WhatsApp. It feels like an elderly acquaintance trying to convince people to get back on Facebook. Perhaps that’s no coincidence. Meta owns both WhatsApp and Facebook. They bought WhatsApp specifically because a VPN used to spy on users’ traffic showed WhatsApp could draw people away from Facebook.
Meta never had your privacy in mind. If you’re going to download an app, at least make it a good one.
In This Article:
Is it Dumb?
“The Green Bubble Drama is dumb. Granted, like so many other stupid culture wars, it’s a decidedly American thing (that bleeds into a few other markets). In most of the world, the first thing everyone does with an iPhone or Android phone is download WhatsApp, which is creeping up on three billion users.”
– Jason Cross, Macworld
Let’s talk about the “Green Bubble Drama” for a second. Is it “dumb?” There are a lot of things I consider “dumb.” How much Americans pay for healthcare is dumb. How no American politicians represent the near-universal support for universal healthcare is dumb. How much Americans pay for wireless service that costs more and is slower than other wireless service in the rest of the world is dumb. How Americans bow down to a monopoly is dumb. How we have different opinions on how to solve gun violence but never do anything is dumb.
Obviously, there’s a lot of things Americans do that are dumb. But is using their cellphone’s phone number as a primary method for sending a message to another cellphone dumb? Is not downloading a third party app by the one of the biggest violators of privacy dumb? Is preferring good quality messaging to bad messaging dumb?
I don’t think so.
A History in Becoming Dumb
SMS and it’s media sending partner MMS are products of their time. They existed when cellphones only could send each other <1-megapixel images anyway. Of course they’re compressed. Of course they can only do text. We were still using T9 for text input when we were using SMS! It was the right product for the right time. And that time was two decades ago. Now? Now it’s dumb.
When iMessage was introduced, it piggybacked on SMS. You’d register with your phone number and, if you were messaging a contact that Apple knew could receive an iMessage, it would send as one. Uncompressed images, read receipts, typing indicators, videos, reactions, end-to-end encryption. Apple wasn’t the first to introduce any of this stuff, but they did make it incredibly seamless. You pull your phone out of the box and you’re already set up. It’s that easy. No third party app, no data collection, just secure, uncompressed, encrypted messaging, as the default. Is using the default when it’s that good dumb? No.
Social Stigma
It’s wrong to bully. It is. But let’s face it, when there’s a smelly kid in class, do you invite them to hang out at your house and deal with the smell the whole time? Is it bullying to exclude the smelly kid? Well, when there’s a kid who ruins your group chats by making all your images look like blocky messes, ruining the gifs you send, keeping anyone from using more modern chat features, you might run two group chats. One for the better messages, one to include your smelly friend.
Now everyone could go download the app from the privacy violator, or the one person could just get an iPhone instead.
I don’t even have to label these. One is obviously the compressed SMS image, the other is right from the SD Card.
It sucks. It does. But is it dumb? It’s perfectly reasonable to not like it when your messages suck. I’m an adult. I have group chats with friends. And, I won’t lie, I do like it better when it’s just iOS users and we’re in blue bubble paradise. We don’t exclude our green bubble friends. It’s just… well, there are separate chats.
Social stigma will always exist if your presence makes things worse. And there are accommodations you can provide, and I think people should get Signal or Discord. But let’s face it, WhatsApp is what is often being offered as the only solution and it’s not a sensible solution.
But is it Dumb?
No. It’s not dumb to want a better chat experience. It’s not dumb to want the chat solution that most people have on their phones, doesn’t require an additional downloads, privacy policies, or terms of service, is secure, has loads of features, and just works. It’s not dumb to want that. It is dumb to tell everyone to download something worse instead of making the experience better for everyone though. Unfortunately, every other option makes things worse in one way or another. That’s why it’s not dumb, it’s just a little annoying.
WhatsApp Privacy Isn’t What You Think
Okay, let’s start with a school metaphor. Let’s say you know the school’s gossip. They know everything about everyone. Now, they start a messaging service. They’ll bring your note to anyone in the school. They’ll even give you a sticker to seal it with so the other person will know if anyone else read it. But, they insist upon sitting over your shoulder to watch you write the message.
Feel safe using them for messages?
Now, enter Meta. Meta had to rebrand from Facebook. Maybe because attaching “Facebook” to the name of all their other apps just brought along the poor reputation of Facebook to everywhere else. Everyone knows Facebook is a privacy violator. They find out everything about you, buy information on you from other websites, sell ad space based on what they know about you, it’s absurd. That’s not to even mention the image problems they got from being implicated in genocide. But Meta? Meta’s fresh! It’s new! A whole new image to eventually ruin with lousy business practices. Meta is the parent company for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, Messenger, and Oculus. They’re the school gossip with the dish on everyone. But surely they’re safe to trust with your personal information, right?
Billions Based on Spying
WhatsApp wasn’t always a Meta (Facebook) property. When Meta (then Facebook) bought WhatsApp, it paid a whopping $19 billion for the app. At the time, it was seen as an insanely high price. It still is. But it was worth it to Meta (then Facebook). Why? How did Meta know WhatsApp would be so vital to their portfolio?
Meta bought a VPN app. This app tracked everything that your phone did. It was supposed to be an app that protected your internet traffic, like other VPN apps that use end-to-end encryption to protect your data. Instead, it shared data with Meta.
Sound familiar yet?
Meta noticed that people were spending a lot of time on WhatsApp. They concluded that WhatsApp is a social networking competitor. Group chats were becoming more popular than social networks. People were spending more time chatting with each other on WhatsApp, interacting more with each other on this messaging app. Facebook realized they were a competitor to Facebook and Messenger, so they bought them out.
WhatsApp became Meta’s through spying.
Anyway, you can trust them though, right? They put the sticker on the message!
How Does WhatsApp Make Money?
We don’t know. We don’t know every path to revenue WhatsApp takes. We’re poking at a black box, building out estimates. That’s because, since Meta (then Facebook) bought WhatsApp, they’ve stopped sharing any revenue figures. Estimates put their revenue at $5.5 billion in 2020, and $8.7 billion in 2021. Where do billions of dollars come from a free app?
The most obvious revenue models are the ones we see. There’s “click to WhatsApp” ads in Instagram and Facebook that push users to send messages to businesses. Businesses have to pay for each message they send to users through the WhatsApp Business API, so that’s another revenue source. There’s also WhatsApp Pay, like Venmo or CashApp, where Meta collects 3.99% of each transaction, charged to the recipient. Basically, it seems like WhatsApp makes most of their money by dealing with businesses. But the service is a black box, we have no idea. When it comes to Facebook and Instagram, the answer is obvious. Data mining and ads. If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. But could WhatsApp be the same? Meta won’t tell us, but their privacy policy does allow for the collection of data.
Get Them And Trap Them
There’s also the fact that businesses change. Shareholders demand infinite growth in a finite world because most of them are trust fund babies who have never done any real work outside of demanding more money. Infinite greed for a finite world. So, how does a company that can’t grow its user base continue to make money? They increase their revenue methods.
Take Facebook. Once upon a time, it was extremely popular. Now, people don’t use it very much. I can’t imagine why. When it first came out, everything you saw was from your friends. Today I scrolled through it and took note of the first 20 posts it showed me. 12 of those 20 were from suggested posts or ads. Five of those 20 posts were from companies I follow. Only three posts out of 20 were from friends of mine.
Facebook changed. They show more ads, more sponsored posts, more suggested posts, more things to keep you engaged and paying them money with your attention span. But nothing like Facebook has challenged it. Sure, Instagram did once, but Meta, then Facebook, bought it. Meta has worked hard to make sure they didn’t have any direct competitors. But you’re also trapped because some people don’t want to jump ship. The elderly are afraid of change and don’t want to sign up for a new service. They don’t want a clean slate. You’re trapped there.
I think about why people say they use WhatsApp, and they always say the same things: “My family’s on there,” “It’s the only way I talk to my grandmother,” “It’s where my group chat is.” All of them are trapped because of other groups of people. WhatsApp has staying power, it has density.
You think if it changed a little people would be able to leave? You think anything would change if Meta said they do read your messages, or they do collect data? If they started showing a banner ad with a $1/year subscription to hide banner ads? You think people would leave?
Yes, Meta Can Read Messages
A ProPublica report in 2021 pointed out that contract workers were reading WhatsApp messages and photos. How could that be? Messages are encrypted end-to-end, Meta can’t read them, right? Well, that doesn’t mean they’re not collected another way. If a person reports a chat, a copy of their “most recent” messages with that contact are sent to Meta for review. The person you report will never know the chats they believed to be secure were sent to Meta to review in plaintext. They’ll never know about the privacy violation. Can you really say you’re 100% certain Meta has never read your WhatsApp messages if there’s a button in the app that will let them read your messages?
WhatsApp shares “metadata, unencrypted records” with law enforcement as well. What metadata do they have to collect that law enforcement uses? How could any of that data be useful if the chats are encrypted end-to-end?
Watching You Write, and Who You Write To
Meta doesn’t make it easy to try to figure out what data they’re collecting, but they are collecting data.
Meta’s privacy policy for WhatsApp isn’t what you think. They lean pretty hard on that “end-to-end encrypted” thing, but it’s tough to define where the “End” is, isn’t it? WhatsApp potentially collects contact data, location data, and other metadata while you use the app. Meta’s surprisingly not very specific about what they can collect and when they do it. Contact data, who you’re messaging, and location are already valuable data points in the Meta data empire. But they could potentially collect so much more. After all, you are entering text directly into their app.
There’s a concept in machine learning called “topic recognition.” Basically, given a sentence, a paragraph, a text message, it can pull out topics. Those topics can help summarize the message. They can also be fantastic for advertising. If Meta could do topic recognition on your messages on device, before you send a message, the metadata they could collect could include brief summaries of your conversations, who you had them with, and where you were when you had those conversations. Those keywords are perfect for advertising. They don’t even have to collect them. They can simply use that local data to choose what ads display on your device, or what ads get sent to your user profile through app-to-app data sharing.
Basically, if a company’s revenue model depends on data collection, expect they’ll be clever about collecting and using that data. You can send a message end-to-end encrypted without losing the most important data points in between. Because Meta is a black box, even hiding their revenue figures and revenue models, it’s impossible to say what they’re doing. It’s impossible to audit them. But when the school gossip insists on peeking over your shoulder as you write a message, I’d bet they’re keeping that information.
Just Get Signal?
iOS has its flaws, but the keyboard doesn’t train Google’s AI, it has intuitive touch accuracy and gestures, there’s consistency in how apps work, it’s more secure, more private, and apps are just better on iOS. I say that as an Android developer, okay? I know what I’m working with. I try to make ice water for the people in OS hell but it always just becomes lukewarm water in their hands. I use Android, I love Android, but it is not a better experience just because it’s more fun to customize.
But, okay, fine. I wouldn’t want the whole world on iOS anyway. I wish there were more options so we didn’t have some ridiculous duopoly. Everyone on iMessage would be great. Everyone not needing an iPhone to do that is the only way I’d want that to happen. But, there is a chat app that can do privacy a whole lot better.
Yeah, Signal.
![Speak Freely Say "hello" to a different messaging experience. An unexpected focus on privacy, combined with all of the features you expect. [A button reads "Get Signal"]](https://i0.wp.com/leafandcore.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Screenshot_2021-04-28-Signal-Messenger-Speak-Freely.png?ssl=1)
Screenshot from Signal.org
You know how Signal makes money? Donations. ther companies licensing their encryption technology for their own messaging apps. Hell, WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol for their end-to-end encrypted messages. It’s easy to see how Signal makes money. It’s available for iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and even Linux. It’s everywhere, it has the features you want, and it’s super private.
It’s not as seamless as iMessage. You do have to download it and verify your phone number to set it up. That’s it, that’s all you have to do. It takes less than a minute. But it’s an extra step, and when grandma’s on WhatsApp, it can be tough to get her to try something new.
But if you really want to drag your group chat out of green bubble hell, the best option is just to move everyone over to Signal. Toss them a donation when you get the chance too. You’ll make your group chats better, more secure, and you won’t be giving any more money to the data hog companies.
Sources/References:
- Karissa Bell, Mashable
- Jason Cross, Macworld
- Zak Doffman, Forbes
- Robin Hill-Gray, Market Realist
- Richard Nieva, CNet
- Vanessa Page, Julius Mansa, Kirsten Rohrs Schmitt, Investopedia
- Charlie Warzel, Ryan Mac, BuzzFeed News