WhatsApp and meta have had a number of data breaches and accoint losses due to how the technology functions.

Signal is so secure that Defence use it. There’s articles of russia “hacking” singal but looking into them shows it’s only via social enginnnering to scan a QR code. Its so secure from accoint and data loss that signal literally can only give minimal evidence in court (compared to the Proton VPN stuff recently).

But TBH you might want to look into “How convince people of Y when they want X”. Your friends want vinilla and you want chocolate. Its not specifically about WhatsApp vs signal.

It was easier for me to just make new friends

The sole fact that it’s open source should be enough to convince anyone, but assuming your family isn’t familiar with the concept you’d have to explain it to them. It can turn into a big conversation pretty quickly. The way I’ve done it (with a close friend group) is with the help of a friend, a respected member of this group who happens to be a developer and militant, so we were two people telling everybody that we need to switch, one of which essentially considered an authority in the matter. If I were you I’d try to find that second person. In numbers, you need fewer arguments to convince people.

I would just make a signal account and let them know they can add you. Maybe get them in one by one.

I don’t think there’s anything on a personal level that you can give them. I personally have accepted that I won’t convince people to switch so I use WhatsApp. That being said, up until very recently you could use the “hidden in the crowd” excuse, e.g. there’s no way for them to monitor every single thing that goes through them effectively, this has changed with the advance of LLMs.

This might not concern them, but the truth is that nothing you do in WhatsApp is private, the fact that you can read the same messages on two different devices at the same time without having had to input any sort of password is a dead giveaway that the information is stored unencrypted in the servers. This means that every message someone has ever sent on WhatsApp is likely stored on a huge database that can be scrapped by LLMs to find out information on an unprecedented level. Finding every user who has broken the law by for example mentioned using weed or illegally downloading content or finding all of the password for all of the accounts people have sent over Whatsapp is as easy as asking it in English. And the question you gotta ask yourself is “Do you trust Meta not to abuse that power? Do you trust every single employee at Meta with access to this database not to scrape it for personal gains?”.

But realistically that would fall on deaf ears. If you truly are serious about this you should flip the script, e.g. “Signal can do everything that WhatsApp can, AND it’s secure, which is important to me even if not to you. If you decide to use WhatsApp you’re saying that my opinion doesn’t matter, because you have no argument other than inertia. It’s like if a friend of yours developed an allergy to shrimps and you decide to still keep meeting in a Bubba Shrimp restaurant weekly because that’s what you’ve been doing.”

What’s app is Facebook, what other argument do you need? Unless this you retirement home group chat how the fuck is anyone under 50 still using Facebook.

I am unconvinced that Zuckerberg isn’t personally searching Meta messages to select future Epstein Island 2.0 victims.

Meta. But perhaps an additional and entirely petty reason: It’s a terrible pun.

It’s simply trust in the organization that maintains the app.

Unless you’re coordination/organizing about legal grey or red areas then it’s not much danger. Meta says it’s E2E but do they really not have access to your data? I don’t believe them. Any data they have would be happily handed over to the authorities just like your protonmail.

Signal just straight up doesn’t have access since it’s all stored at the endpoint and they provide no remote backup.

It doesn’t spam your phone with photos, unless you decide to download them

It doesn’t backup your conversations to your already nearly full, Google owned Drive

Dark mode by default

Not owned by Meta

No frills, I couldn’t care less for “personal stories” or whatever bs Whatsapp has

Basically it is somewhat more respectful of your agency as a user.

…edit: yes you have a setting to toggle backup off. And to change background to whatever you want. And I’m sorry for you, because your deeply cynical friends (your words) probably won’t care about my points either. Because in essence, all my reasons rest on personal values. Which your friends already don’t care about, else they would be complaining about things such as no space on phone or being annoyed at having to change settings for things they don’t want or need.

I use signal but never managed to get rid of WhatsApp. It’s a default app nowadays and most people use it. I constantly deal with random customers and whatnot through it. Only family is on signal. Which is sort of nice, I see a signal notification and know it’s someone important.

Everything by meta is spyware.

Separate from privacy, on WhatsApp I regularly got messages by spam accounts. Not daily, but pretty close. Have never gotten a spam message on signal

Plenty of report out there that even if WhatsApp is e2e meta is harvesting as much info as it can from it. Signal has proven to store as minimal as possible.

One is owned by a US tech corp whose primary income stream is building advertising profiles on users and selling advertising space to businesses while handing data off to authoritarian governments without warrants.

The other is a US non profit where the FBI admitted the only data they can get from them is when the user registered and when they were last online.

Signal is nonprofit

Whatsapp = Facebook (Meta)

thats everything you need to know about the striking differences of the two. One actually tries to respect your privacy while the other is exploiting you for using its product