When I very recently started using WhatsApp, the client displayed a link to a blog post[0] they wrote about why charging subscription fees was important and a g

When I very recently started using WhatsApp, the client displayed a link to a blog post[0] they wrote about why charging subscription fees was important and a good thing: "At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it's all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out... And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen. "Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product. ... "When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say 'Have you considered the alternative?'" Given that this new blog post carefully talks about not introducing "third-party ads", presumably first-party ads are still on the table? Which would make this new model the alternative that they warned us about earlier. [0] https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads