This is due to WhatsApp refusing to break e2ee to comply with this massive and intrusive online safety bill that is currently working its way through parliament. My preferred outcome would be both the online safety bill and whatsapp disappear but neither of those things seems at all likely.
UK politics do seem a little unconstrained at the moment. The UK will become a world leader in secure private messaging because eliminating red tape will permit innovative British industry to develop new encryption paradigms based on angle trisection, while the rest of the world still uses boring old elliptic curves.
is the concept of people being able to talk on groups over the internet so bad?
or maybe it’s the ad network that whatsapp is related to. ads are just information telling you a product exists. is this bad?
or maybe your gripe is against social media causing mental health issues. maybe the information that your neighbor is better off than you are is inherently dangerous? who says this problem wouldn’t exist without social media?
disclosure i work for meta but i don’t want to believe that i work on a bad product.
I dislike WhatsApp as a product for a few reasons (which I’ll describe below) and also because I keep getting forced to use it by various situations. Eg one place I worked a lot of comms with the founders was on whatsapp. Since then I tried to delete whatsapp but have been dragged back because some family cooperation is organized on whatsapp.
As a replacement for working SMS group chat in a group that includes people with android phones whatsapp is serviceable especially if the conversations are relatively ephemeral (eg let’s coordinate between no more than about 4 people to meet up at some event). THe problem I have with it is generally that it expands beyond that to become very long-lived threads and/or large groups without product features to support that. So it becomes “slack with a lobotomy”.
Also I dislike whatsapp because people can’t keep themselves on topic and the product sucks if people go off topic and start forking the conversation. This gets worse and worse as the chat goes on and in particular if there are more than a very small number of people in the chat. Case in point: I am literally on a whatsapp group now trying to organize a funeral and one of the people is cracking jokes and talking about one of their coworker’s neouroses. It’s really hard and annoying to go back skipping reams and reams of junk to find the 3 or 4 facts I actually need from the conversation.
