Oh sorry, I’m not denying that at all. I was only drawing on the comparison of Gmail being pretty ubiquitous like WhatsApp is.

My guess is that in some form they track contacts and link clicks. I genuinely don’t think they’re reading messages, but I think they do know eg that Bob is someone that likes to send people links and that there are 5 people that always open those links. So they may have directed model of linked topics between people.

Even if this isn’t true though, owning WhatsApp probably gives Meta a lot of culture impact in a similar way to Google and Gmail. The fact that they could create their Meta AI model and put it in front of like a billion people overnight won’t be lost on shareholders.

Yeah same here, I’ve only had mine a few months but I’m having a blast with it and don’t see why that has to change just because there’s something a bit nicer out there.

I agree, even if they are harvesting that data I’d honestly rather it was Google than a thousand little companies that barely anyone even knows exist and can get away with more illegal action.

Feel like I’ll get flamed for saying it but I use this service and I think it’s good. I don’t see the privacy concern. If you look at the privacy policy they state that they essentially do not use your browsing activity for anything other than ensuring the vpn is working. They also open source their client application. Anyone can say they’re evil and they lie or whatever but in my country and many others the statements they’ve made about how this works and the data they use mean something.