Many people where I am are using it because they don’t want to change and everyone they know is also on WhatsApp. It’s so pervasive that we have businesses on it, schools, work everything. It’s impossible to get away from. Most people don’t care about privacy, only convenience.
Discussion
So it's like WeChat, even work documents were shared on it. Insane!
Yea, that's what I always thought. People who use it don't care about privacy. But today someone told me to use it instead texting because we can message privately. So yea their privacy rollout definitely had some people's attention, they just need to go deeper with their understanding of the topic.
People could encrypt with pgp and pass the result through whatsapp but still leaks metadata
this is the real issue. network effects are a real, hard-to-overcome problem. I've successfully moved a few friends and family over to my Matrix server, while others are reluctant to leave apps like Whatsapp because "it's where I talk to everyone!"
You see the same problem with people saying they *want* to quit facebook/twitter/whatever and come over to more open platforms, but "None of my friends are on those platforms!"