By Don Aguiar
Mumbai: There’s a lot of misunderstanding about privacy and security that’s been articulated in many groups and especially on social media. As someone who is very particular about devices and accounts being secure let me dispel some of the myths.
What WhatsApp collects about each individual, there is nothing new in that, WhatsApp has always been doing that from the beginning, WhatsApp has info on your phone number, other people’s phone numbers in your contacts, your status updates and when you were last online.
Since 2016 WhatsApp has been sharing that data with its parent company, Facebook. WhatsApp however has an option where a user can opt out of sharing the data with Facebook, have you ever exercised that option? Now the only thing that has changed is – that option won’t be available anymore.
Post February 8 WhatsApp will be sharing everyone’s data with Facebook, which is already the case with most people, except the people who have exercised the option of not sharing their WhatsApp data with Facebook that option won’t exist anymore. So technically nothing will change, your info is already shared with Facebook since 2016 and that will continue.
The reason that WhatsApp is doing this is because Facebook wants to monetize their investments by targeted advertising and Facebook is doing this because phone manufacturers, especially Apple, are addressing privacy concerns and with Apple’s iOS 14 update, Users have to give consent to being tracked by Facebook.
So for people who are troubled by this there are other options like Telegram and Signal.
Telegram is a Russian app and its management is shrouded in secrecy, they keep changing their operational headquarters. Telegram like WhatsApp is not an altruistic venture and they too want to monetize their investments and they are also building a platform for targeted advertising. Also Telegram is not completely end to end encrypted and they store all user data with their decryption keys on their servers. Telegram has been hacked many times most famously in Iran, where data about millions of accounts were stolen.
That leaves only Signal. Signal was founded by Brian Acton, one of the creators and founders of WhatsApp, after he sold WhatsApp to Facebook.
Signal is end to end encrypted and doesn’t collect much data except your phone number… and your data is not saved on servers but your device. Signal is run by a non-profit organisation and doesn’t want to monetize their investments. It is run by ‘donations,’ because Signals working model is altruistic and their funding is based on donations only. There is serious doubt that they can scale up to manage much more than the users they already have. Running a messaging app requires lot of investments in technology, especially big servers.
Signal has about 40 million users now, and if more migrate there rapidly, their systems will crash and it has already happened in the past and I don’t know how a non-profit messaging app can survive catering to hundreds of millions or a billion users. Also Signal’s data is not stored on a Server/Cloud but locally on your device, so every time you buy a new phone you will have to manually transfer your old Signal messages and data, and there is nothing much you can do if your phone crashes.
A situation like this gives influential people playing the stock market a handle to take advantage of the loopholes and increase their wealth. So, whether people have properly understood the pros and cons of the new WhatsApp policy or the working and configuration of Telegram and Signal, many have already started migrating to Signal.
This happened after because Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, recently tweeted that he recommends using Signal as an instant messaging app – instead of the incumbent WhatsApp. This was on account of WhatsApp updating its Privacy Policy.
Now look, Elon Musk has about 40 million followers on Twitter. When he says something, people listen. So yeah, Signal – the messaging app – saw a rise in downloads with more than 100,000 downloads in just 2 days. But something else happened too… and that was weird – The stock price of Signal Advance – an entirely unrelated Texas-based technology company – which works on healthcare and industrial applications – surged.
The shares surged from 60 cents, before Musk’s tweet on January 7, to $8.30 on January 15 – a surge of more than 1100 percent. Such is the weirdness of the stock market. And an upward rise and a big bonus for Signal. Will it be able to handle it?