F**k Facebook

As I'm sure most of you reading this will have seen that Whatsapp recently forced all its users to agree to new terms and if you aren't happy with them - tough. You have to stop using Whatsapp.

The 8000 word document, roughly comes down to the fact that Whatsapp will now share your data with its parent company, Facebook, including (but not limited to) your location data, battery level, IMEI number and mobile network provider. On top of this, the app will send data about the groups you are part of, any real-time status you set and your profile photo. There is also a separate section in the new policy called 'Transactions and Payments data.' which in a nutshell lets Facebook store and analyse any payments you make through Whatsapp 😲

I should point out that for now, at least, Facebook won't be reading your actual messages though, they are remaining encrypted. But honestly, who trusts Facebook enough to believe this won't change in the not too distant future...

As a result of these changes and not surprisingly, a lot of people are now looking to alternatives and I have picked out the 2 most popular to compare against Whatsapp: Signal and Telegram.

To start off with Telegram is clearly the winner when it comes to features. Being able to hide your contact number from message contacts and creating a username to display instead, or pinning messages to the top of groups chats or editing messages after they've been sent - these are just a few of the great reasons to use to Telegram. But if you want a privacy and security based reason use switch then their Ts and Cs clearly state that We don't use your data to show you ads, which is exactly what Facebook promised would always be the case when they aquired Whatsapp back in 2014. Telegram doesn't offer end to end encryption for standard messages (secret messages do however) but are user-to-server encrypted, meaning that the chats can't be intercepted and will be stored on the server in an encrypted manner, but obviously this isn't as good as user to user or end to end encryption.

While Telegram is the front runner in features, for the more security and privacy aware of you then Signal is the clear winner here. When Whatsapp was built, it used Open Whisper Systems to integrate the Signal encrypted messaging protocol to achieve end to end encryption, (OWS is also used by Google and Microsoft as it's considered the gold standard in encrypted communications).

Open Whisper Systems is now called Signal and is part of the Signal Foundation, who have poured a lot of effort into building their own communications app. The app uses end to end encryption which can't be intercepted and read, as Signal uses on device encryption meaning the decryption keys are only stored on the local device and not in a database somewhere. My one warning about using Signal would be that switching to it after years of using Whatsapp, might be frustrating as some basic features we've come to reply on are missing, like the online status or last seen time. Not serious, but worth mentioning.

So, in summary, first of all stop using Whatsapp unless your happy with Facebook having access to more and more of your data. If you want a solid alternative to Whatsapp, which won't use your data to sell you ads and your not too worried about the slim possibility that your messages might one day get compromised then Telegram is the way to go.

However, if you're Kim Jong Un and need to slide into Donald Trumps inbox, then Signal is the way to go. Its less feature rich than Telegram, but has security dialled to 11 and is an excellent "basic" messenger service.

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