In some countries, you can't perform essential tasks such as booking a doctor's appointment without Whatsapp. It's not that simple.
my proposal is more radical. rally to ban FB in that country. incentivize local companies to come up with alternative solutions.
zuck and his comrades have no business poking their noses into foreigners medical data anyway. it would also avoid less taxes being lost on facebooks Double Irish tax evasion. treat them like the cancer they are. don't celebrate FB engineers and call them out for the useful idiots they are.
Living in a country where local social networks are more popular with general population than foreign ones (Russia), I'd rather prefer FAANG. "Local companies" may sound good because the word "local" has some nice connotations, like your "local store" or "local coffee shop". But in reality, "local companies" do all the bad stuff that Facebook does, and also go above and beyond to cooperate with the state against the protesters or any political dissidents. And they're also not as good at writing software, so these networks have significantly worse design and a lot more bugs.
There are millions of example where people want to solve a problem, think that they will be able to do it with government regulation, and end up with a situation that is much worse. But even among them, this is a case where it could only make situation worse. And much, much worse.
Meanwhile, here in the real world, let's stick to the better one of the bad choices we have.
This is the basic idea behind zero-knowledge systems using homomorphic encryption to do very cool things.
One reason is because a lot of phone plans include few or no calls/SMS but include unlimited Whatsapp. When one app is completely ubiquitous in a society and free, people will simply not understand why you want to do something a different way and will often wonder if you’re trying to scam them.
we 'd be truly screwed if crappy WA would be adamand for such in any given country, even Putinocchio's, Xi's or KJU's. that country 'd be even more crappier than WA, and all FB-associated, which in turn would be quite an achievement on quite a, literally and metaphorically, negative scale in its own right
I do not like that Google get to know when I need to visit the hospital, or collect information about my children's activities in school. But currently we do not have an option.