I have not been much of a Facebook fan for data privacy reasons. A couple of years ago I deleted my Instagram and Facebook accounts, in fact, and am now only connected to them via WhatsApp. However, living in Europe, it is a lot more difficult to get rid of that, so I have been very hesitant.

WhatsApp was supposed to stay independent and separate when it was purchased by Facebook in 2014, but users will have noticed lately that they need to accept a new privacy policy where data from Whatsapp will be shared with Facebook. Chats are, supposedly, still end-to-end encrypted, but it is a new step towards integration.

This new Privacy Policy together with people seeming to sign up for Telegram lately (I get notifications about that as I have the app installed), has made me review my intention to delete WhatsApp once again. However, although there are certainly technical alternatives that are basically just as good as WhatsApp, there is a real issue with the user base, making the services practically useless.

In my particular situation, for instance, I have 220 contacts on WhatsApp including all 14 of my adult close family members. Naturally, also all of my friends are on WhatsApp. So what about alternative solutions?

• When looking at Telegram, I do see that 73 of my contacts are on the chat service which is not a bad stat at all, however, only 2 of my adult family members are amongst them, indicating that my crucial contacts don’t actually use it.
• Signal, probably one of the most secure and private messaging services , only covers 12 of my contacts, including 2 adult family members.
• And lastly, RCS is activated on 37 of my contacts' phones, including again 2 adult family members.

As you can see, Telegram is certainly best positioned for me to become the alternative chat service in my life, but I do need to convince first many family members and friends to jump over and we all know how difficult that is. At least, it appears in my circle that Telegram has a little bit of momentum, so I am keeping my fingers crossed.

RCS gives me some hope for a couple of reasons. Firstly, people don’t actually have to install a new service and sign up for it. We “just” need to wait for their operator and phone manufacturer to support it (which unfortunately Apple probably never will). And, secondly, it always has regular text messages as the back up.

My personal preference would be to use Signal, but at this point I just don’t see how that can become a mainstream solution given that it has been available already for many years and is a feature rich solution, but to little avail.

So, come February, I am afraid that I will have to accept the conditions in order to continue using WhatsApp as I just don’t see how I can reasonably leave it behind at this point.

To be continued…