> As I understand it, they're both e2e encrypted The important distinction here is that WhatsApp uploads your entire contact book to Facebook. They have up-to-

> As I understand it, they're both e2e encrypted The important distinction here is that WhatsApp uploads your entire contact book to Facebook. They have up-to-date information on your entire real-life social graph (including people who are not on Facebook and/or never shared their phone with Facebook) and the groups you belong to. If you don't believe me, request a copy of your data in WhatsApp and see for yourself. So, by using WhatsApp, you are basically snitching on your friends and uploading their data. Think about the implications — one day, you or one of your friends will add a phone number to Facebook (of course, "for security purposes only, to recover your account". From that moment, Facebook will be able to link an online identity to an offline one, and mine a trove of data: friends, groups, locations. If you want a different way of looking at it, Facebook paid $19 billion for WhatsApp. That's how much it was worth to them. You don't spend 19 billion dollars just to watch e2e encrypted messages fly by. I admire the way WhatsApp markets itself as the "encrypted" communications app, somehow hiding the whole problem with groups and contacts as insignificant. Another frequently seen spin is on Signal: that it "only hashes" the phone numbers and that it's "effectively the same thing". Good PR moves, both.