There are workarounds but they're not as painless as simply deciding to 'use an alternative chat alternative'. It's like saying you don't like English? Well try esperanto and good luck functioning in the US. I've given some extremely exaggerated examples, particularly this last one haha, but I've found reliance on Whatsapp to be substantial and on the rise.

I do agree by the way that this isn't that big a deal. I'm completely fine to continue using them, but if I wasn't the proposed 'just stop using them, there's chat alternatives' really doesn't fly. It'd be really shitty.

In my experience telling people that you prefer a different medium from whatsapp is not a big deal.

Some people will understand why you don't have Facebook, but not having WhatsApp is downright mad. Specially if you work with technology.

The only people I know that don't have it are luddites or very old people, and even they are far and few between.

I don't have it and no one I interact with at work had asked for my WhatsApp. I work in tech but NOT in the SV bubble. Everyone I know uses Google Hangouts.

Messenger apps have always been regional, back in high school everyone I knew used MSN Messenger while people I knew from my old hometown were all on AIM.

tl;dr: there are a lot of countries/language regions where Whatsapp is the absolutely dominant messenger.

I think you mean especially. And no its not uncommon to not have or use Whatsapp. Nobody on my current team uses it and nobody on my last one did either. We use IRC and Slack and that is enough. And none of us are Luddites or old people.

As it's been said before, it's very geographically dependent. In here, there isn't a local shop or service that doesn't advertise its WhatsApp number. Even the city hall's ombudsman answers via WhatsApp. Not email, not phone.

I'd love to be able to communicate through open protocols such as IRC and email alone. But that's not the world I, and I would wager, most, live in.

I will double check, but I think the setup and configuration is already complete for most people's phones, so no additional install needed.

edit: to clarify I mean I should join the opt-out side to help stop it from becoming socially unacceptable

It is perfectly possible not to use them (I don't), but it is not without downsides.

Either way, it's time to switch banks. And it's a good thing that you told me about it, as in Romania we also have ING and was considering then for my business account.

Not even remotely. I realize that WhatsApp is a big thing, but I've never even used it or have anyone in my circle who uses it. And I work in the tech industry.

Do people really feel social pressure to use a specific app?

I can't deduce from your profile where you are from, but can people stop extrapolating the situation in the US to the rest of the world? There are many countries where is Whatsapp is far more popular than SMS or any other messenger, country-wide.

OK, so then your phone number is still being shared with Facebook through people who use WhatsApp and have you in their contact list. How do you opt out of that?

There are some Internet 'outrages' that are just sound and fury, but this one has merit. A company that gained access to one of people's most private networks, their contact list, on a guarantee of privacy that has been unilaterally revoked. People were gladly paying to maintain the service and the associated level of privacy.

Thankfully the ICO in the UK is 'outraged' enough to formally investigate:

https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-bl...

The Whatsapp ToS also says that they can change the ToS anytime they want and however they want and people using their software knew this. This is the risk that exists with every single proprietary platform. If you don't own the code, eventually it is going to screw you, Stallman has been saying so for 40 years now and people still get surprised when it happens even though it eventually happens to every single proprietary platform. Don't want to get screwed over? Use open source platform where you control your data.

As for the ICO, they are the incompetents responsable for the cookie alert on every page simply because they don't understand how stateless network protocol work, no doubt they will do a great job "investigating" this case /s

This isn't just about WhatsApp. Just about every Cloud service ToS ever written contains the provision to "change the ToS anytime they want and however they want ". People have a (probably ill-founded) expectation that those changes will be fairly reasonable. By pushing things to the legal limit (and beyond) WhatsApp is poisoning the well for everybody else.

You have to appreciate that if users no longer have any trust in the cloud then half the readers of this site are going to be out of a job. You think all the people who attend your React.js conferences are working on open source projects that the users install on hardware that they control? I very much doubt it.

If you think Stallman is right then surely you should be spreading this example of his correctness to as many people as possible so that they find out about it. But the impression I get from your posts is that you'd rather people weren't talking about it at all.

Personally I hope that more Cloud services blatantly piss off their users in this way, because I want the entire idea of cloud services to be discredited. And yes that means that I'm hoping Patrick Aljord doesn't have cloud startup devs paying to attend his javascript conferences anymore.

I agree, but the problem here is ignorance. Ignorant people are always going to get screwed, that's why we should fight ignorance and educate users. Fighting people taking advantage of this ignorance is just fighting the symptoms of the real problem that is ignorance, it is also a losing battle. So, I prefer spending time educating people about these issues rather than attacking whatsapp, facebook and other apps they love as this just makes us look grumpy. I think it's ok to use the cloud as long as you're aware nothing you put in there won't be spied on unless you encrypt _before_ uploading it to the cloud (end to end), then you should be ok. So either don't put anything too personal on the cloud or encrypt it before hand is the advice I give.

The relevant part:

"I think if you look at the way that people tend to organise in groups and communities, there are often informal communications networks that bind them together, that allow them to communicate, make plans, coordinate activities. If you introduce something like the GSM cellular network to this group, and if I start using it, I am subject to something that is very well known called the No Network Effect. If I am the only one with a cell phone it's really not worth very much. The value of the network is in the number of people that are connected to it and that if I'm the only one I can't really communicate with anyone.

However if I somehow manage to get everyone to start using my communications network it becomes very effective and very valuable. But there is an interesting side effect, which is that the old informal mechanisms people use to communicate and to collaborate disappear, that they are destroyed by the introduction of technology. The technology actually changes the social fabric of how people communicate and coordinate. Mobile phones, there are many obvious examples. People used to make plans, they would say: "I'll meet you on this street corner at this time on this day and, you know, we'll do something" and now people say "I'll call you when I'm getting off work" or "I'll text you" and if you don't have a mobile phone you can't really participate in this type of organisation and you begin to find yourself kind of alone. Because if I now make a choice not to be a part of this cellular network, there is sort of an interesting thing where once again I am subject to the no network effect. The network that used to exist, the informal communications channels, has been destroyed.

So yes, I made a choice to have a mobile phone, but what kind of choice did I make? I think this is sort of an interesting phenomenon. What happens is a choice is introduced; it starts as a very simple choice: the choice of whether or not to have a mobile phone, a simple piece of technology. But slowly things happen to expand the scope of that choice until eventually it's so big as to encompass not just whether you have a mobile phone or not but whether you want to be a part of society. In some ways the choice to have a mobile phone today has become not necessarily just whether you have a piece of consumer electronics in your pocket but whether or not you are even a part of society, and that's a much bigger choice. Maybe not one that we should have to make, or at least maybe one that isn't really a choice at all."

END QUOTE

There's some irony here now that Moxie has teamed up with Facebook to work on WhatsApp.

And Google with their Allo : https://whispersystems.org/blog/allo/