Why Privacy is important - and starts with the messenger you use

I don’t know if you share this feeling, but the political situation in Italy (and Europe more generally) feels more and more tense. Journalists are being hunted by the Meloni Government, and the laws are being changed to control and suppress peaceful protest. Many people that I know here take active part in democratic civil society by designing workshops, expressing themselves in public, or by simple neighborhood organising, and I keep wondering how close they are to being targeted by some new measure from the state. Things that might have been normal political participation a few years back somehow now are criminalised by the state that governs us. In this context, making sure that we leave few traces of our communications becomes important. If there is no trace in the first place about with whom, how much, and what I communicate, there is nothing to read out and save by any authority.

Yet still, I see most people and me included glued to services that do the opposite. And WhatsApp seems like the most obvious one.

Wait, what’s wrong with Whatsapp?

WhatsApp is everywhere. It’s the default for family groups, work chats, and even political groups use it (the last one is baffling). Using WhatsApp means trusting Meta (formerly Facebook), a company that has repeatedly shown it cannot be trusted with personal data.

WhatsApp claims your messages are “end-to-end encrypted,” but that doesn’t mean they’re private (Video on why it is not). Just recently, a case in the US was opened that claimed that Meta actually can read any chat they want (The Guardian). Another problem, is the cloud back-up that Whatsapp does by default (check your settings on this). This back-up is not encrypted and can freely be read by anyone that has access to the cloud. Meta has a long history of working with government and maps user network, who speaks to whom, when, for how long, and which groups you share with whom (Mozilla Foundation, 2025). Also, it’s not clear how well the company protects the data they collect. In November, Austrian researchers were able to access the whole user data base of Whatsapp, and extract profile images and phone numbers. Finally, since 2021, Meta shares User data across Meta products to create user profiles, and track people across devices. Officially, this is not happening in Europe because of Data Protection Laws, but it shows, that Meta is able to track you and since the software is not open source, it is also difficult to track if Meta is lying or not.

So what can we do?

There are many alternatives out there but in all honesty, signal is the easiest and most direct one. It looks, and feels, like Whatsapp but does nothing of the most problematic things.

It is run by a non-profit that doesn’t have an interest in circumventing data protection for money. Furthermore, it’s mostly open source, and in court cases where governments forced them to reveal data, all they could share was the phone number used to sign up, the account creation date, and the last log-in. And the user base is already big enough that you will know some people using it.

It will be difficult to replace Whatsapp entirely, but starting with closer friends and political groups already enables a future change.

This is the Signal website.

Then, change the settings in whatsapp. Your back-up currently is not encrypted, and this allows direct access to your messages! Secondary steps should be 2-factor authentication, and automatic message deletion for old messages (i know the last one is hard but starting to save important messages directly instead of entrusting them to Meta might feel quite nice)

Links

If you like some video explanation, have a look at this youtube video on why to use signal. And these peertube videos that explain WhatsApp’s data policy and how it circumvents encryption, and how tech companies handle data more generally, and why the meta data Whatsapp collects creates problems