Lets know what is signal app? If you are a WhatsApp user, you will have seen a pop-up notification from the application that refers to a privacy update. For those of us who clicked, the content was far from clear, but many people interpreted it as a change in policy that resulted in personal information being shared with WhatsApp’s parent company Facebook. The result has been a wave of user buzz and a rise in popularity for alternative messaging apps, especially Signal. Still we have many questions than the answer. Is WhatsApp now giving all of our information to Facebook for advertising purposes? What is Signal app? And how did Elon Musk’s name get into this? We will try to answer these questions and more with this summary of the situation.
Does WhatsApp now share personal information with Facebook?
Yes and no. The “yes” refers to the fact that the information is shared with the largest Facebook network. The “no” refers to the “now” aspect. Unless you opted out for a brief period in 2016, WhatsApp has actually been sharing limited information, including your phone number and profile name, with its main network all this time.
The WhatsApp privacy update mainly served two purposes. The first was to clarify the information you share. The second was to reveal that, following the changes in business chats last year, companies that use Facebook to host their WhatsApp chats can access the information collected there and use it for advertising and similar purposes.
Sadly WhatsApp did a pretty poor job of informing what has changed and what has not. Despite an attempt at clarification, negative sentiment towards the app has skyrocketed. Suspicious users have been searching for alternatives, and while the already popular Telegram has seen a surge in downloads, the Signal app has reaped the most benefit.
What is Signal app?
Signal is a messaging app that works almost similarly like WhatsApp &Telegram. You register with a phone number and then you can participate in private chats, group chats and group calls with all the expected details. However, unlike the others, all communications on Signal, including file transfers, are end-to-end encrypted. Additionally, the application code is completely open source, allowing for a unique level of transparency. Signal is not even owned by a technology company, but is run by a non-profit organization. In today’s data-hungry business online world, Signal strikes people like a bright light. And with a simple two-word tweet “Use Signal” to his 42.4 million followers, Elon Musk was instrumental in making Signal one of the most downloaded apps on the top two app stores.
Should I switch to Signal?
With all the confusion over WhatsApp’s privacy policy, alternative apps saw a huge jump in downloads. Telegram saw a double jump in early January, while Signal was downloaded 17.8 million times, a staggering 61-fold increase over the previous week.
Now you have more information, you can now make an informed decision. If the fact that Facebook has had your phone number all this time doesn’t bother you and you don’t plan on doing messaging business, then not much is going to change. You will also need to take into account the fact that it is unlikely that you will be able to convince more than a fraction of your regular contacts to make the switch.
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