Whatsapp adopted the Signal Protocol back in 2015. They unilaterally started enforcing E2E for billions of people despite not having any obvious business case f

Whatsapp adopted the Signal Protocol back in 2015. They unilaterally started enforcing E2E for billions of people despite not having any obvious business case for it. And they implemented it well: it's not optional, and completely seemless for all users. It just works in Whatsapp's otherwise great UX. Just the fact they have E2E alone makes Whatsapp better than any reasonably popular alternative - it's better from a privacy perspective than Facebook/Instagram messages, Google Hangouts, Telegram, email, sms text, RCS (not really popular but hey), Slack, Discord, Skype and any old school messengers. I mean I guess it kinda sucks that Whatsapp isn't Signal, or E2E Jabber, or E2E Matrix. But man, it could've been so much worse. It was so much worse. A global network accessible to and used by billions of people sending E2E encrypted messages was a privacy activist's wet dream 6 years ago. Whatsapp's move to E2E alone is amongst the most impactful changes in real-world privacy on the entire internet. Calling that a 'dumpster fire' because they transparently communicate they still know metadata about you really does make you seem like a robot. 'Dumpster fire' is not a synonym for 'has room to improve'. This kind of talk is par for the course on Twitter surely, but not it's not unreasonable to expect some flak for it.