> At the time they "made a big deal about" keeping the app separate from Facebook and maintaining users' privacy, but they were lying.
I'm hardly going to defend Facebook/Meta, but by and large, WhatsApp is still separate from Facebook properties. It doesn't require connecting identities to any other Meta-owned property to use it, and all messages on it are end-to-end encrypted[0] - a change which happened after Facebook acquired WhatsApp. There was a proposed change about six months or a year ago, but it was walked back after public criticism.
There are a lot of things to criticize Facebook for, but WhatsApp has remained, at least so far, pretty independent - and if anything, more privacy-preserving than it was at the time Facebook acquired it.
Of all the independent products that Facebook has degraded over time and locked in to its walled garden (Instagram, Oculus, etc.), WhatsApp is the outlier, not the rule.
[0] Every time this is brought up on HN, it always devolves into a discussion about how "the client is not open-source so you can't trust it", followed by an inevitable segue into reproducible builds and federated clients, etc. etc.
They don't require you to connect your identities because they can do that for you by heavily encouraging you to add your phone number to all their apps. All metadata about where you are and who you're talking to goes to Facebook.
Imagine if instead of acquiring WhatsApp, Facebook allowed you to install its Messenger app and sign up with a phone number instead of a Facebook account. Would you then consider the Messenger app to be appropriately separate and independent from Facebook? It has end-to-end encryption.
> There was a proposed change about six months or a year ago, but it was walked back after public criticism.
Was that change ever walked back? I recall that Whatsapp wanted to send metadata (not the messages themselves, but phone numbers, IP addresses, etc) to Facebook/Meta for advertising purposes. I know it was delayed, but I deleted my Whatsapp account before having to accept the new terms.
I'm hardly going to defend Facebook/Meta, but by and large, WhatsApp is still separate from Facebook properties. It doesn't require connecting identities to any other Meta-owned property to use it, and all messages on it are end-to-end encrypted[0] - a change which happened after Facebook acquired WhatsApp. There was a proposed change about six months or a year ago, but it was walked back after public criticism.
There are a lot of things to criticize Facebook for, but WhatsApp has remained, at least so far, pretty independent - and if anything, more privacy-preserving than it was at the time Facebook acquired it.
Of all the independent products that Facebook has degraded over time and locked in to its walled garden (Instagram, Oculus, etc.), WhatsApp is the outlier, not the rule.
[0] Every time this is brought up on HN, it always devolves into a discussion about how "the client is not open-source so you can't trust it", followed by an inevitable segue into reproducible builds and federated clients, etc. etc.