• smeg@feddit.uk
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    3 hours ago

    Look, I’m not trying to be a smartarse here, I’m genuinely interested in different ways people use technology. I am telling you that every person I know, regardless of age, defaults to using WhatsApp for communications; even my elderly relatives.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      Ok, perhaps I misjudged you. For me, even younger people typically don’t use other messengers besides sms. I’ve only ever successfully gotten like 5 people to install signal. The other most popular messengers in the us, Facebook messenger and Whatsapp, are probably much worse for privacy than sms, due to meta ownership.

      • smeg@feddit.uk
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        1 hour ago

        Yeah I’ve got about half of my friends and family using Signal, but when even a single one refuses then the whole group chat ends up staying in WhatsApp. WhatsApp does at least seem better than Facebook messenger though, as it allegedly implements the Signal protocol so should still be E2E encrypted. “Allegedly”, because it’s closed source and run by the trustworthy philanthropists as Facebook who I’m sure are data mining as much as they can from it, but I think people would have found out if it was a total lie. Still better than SMS though which may as well be public.

        Where in the world are you? I speak for the UK when I talk about WhatsApp being the de-facto messenger. How do people do group chats or send files if they’re still using SMS?

        • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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          18 minutes ago

          Well, yeah, Whatsapp is e2e encrypted but also I’m pretty sure it’s known that the app can/does use chat data on the client side. If they aren’t doing that, they could always start someday because for the conversations to be readable they are decrypted on the device end for each user. And I would put nothing past Meta.

          I’m in the US. Group chats infamously have this “green/blue bubble” issue where many iPhone users would have a group chat (automatically using iMessage) and then if an android user gets added, the chat gets downgraded to MMS I think and the android user shows as a green bubble. It’s a weird cultural thing where the iPhone users (as designed by apple) think the android user has a crappy phone because they designed their ecosystem like that. I am sure overall many people use non-sms apps but it’s pretty rare for someone to assume I use Whatsapp, they typically ask first. And people using signal is also rare ime. But I’m sure all this would be much different for younger people than me. I know Snapchat is still pretty popular and I’ve barely used it (hated it).