It's interesting to see WhatsApp held up as an exemplar of private communication, since Facebook is extraordinarily aggressive about mining the message metadata

It's interesting to see WhatsApp held up as an exemplar of private communication, since Facebook is extraordinarily aggressive about mining the message metadata and linking your WhatsApp use to your Facebook account. But what this article misses is the large neutral space of semi-private conversation that has disappeared over the last few years. More and more social spaces now come with a permanent transcript (whether public or held by a private party), and political organizing in particular has moved to sites like Facebook and to email mailing lists. It takes special effort and a fair amount of technical savvy to create spaces where people can speak in public, but not have their words live in perpetuity. What we've ended up with is a world where private parties can communicate securely one-to-one (through messengers like WhatsApp or Signal), companies and political parties can micro-target segmented audiences in ways that are invisible to outside observers, but the broad public is not able to have casual conversations online that are not permanently recorded.