Given the amount of people deeply involved in the tech industry who read hn probably my opinion will not be very popular. But I feel obliged to add a few lines about WhatsApp.

In a worrying technological landscape, it has been for a long time an application with a good tradeoff between privacy and convenience.

I have always respected and praised this application, due to its philosophy: Acton and Koum made millions of dollars without the need of advertising.

> Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.
> These days companies know literally everything about you, your friends, your interests, and they use it all to sell ads.
> Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.
> When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say “Have you considered the alternative?”

Like me, many people I know do not use social media (I'm 25 and not all of us use them, it's real), but virtually all of us use WhatsApp to keep in touch, share photos, locations, media, and even to create groups to discuss, meet, organize events.

We use the application in a so pervasive manner that we started considering it as a part of our daily routine: phrases such as "How long do you need to get there? Send me your position." are now regulars.

The reason we use wa, is because wa is not a social media.

Because "At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That's our product, and that's our passion. Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it."

Because when my mobile connection exceeds the data limit and my ISP applies a bandwidth throttling (32KBps) it is the only application that is able to send messages without making me worry about additional costs.

Because when loading an image, this is compressed in an automatic way.
Because it allows me to call my relatives and friends easily and simply when I'm abroad.

The problem is not only the integration of wa data without prior permission, but also the recent decisions taken, aka "status".

Status is a social media thing, and nobody wants another useless social media.

All my friends are asking me
- They do not know what to invent to know everything about us, right ?
- Why this after end2end encryption ?
- Do you see how little this is used ?
- The reviews on the store are the worst of all the time ! Why did they do this ?
- Not here ! Can I get the old version ?
- I hope in many are gonna leave, which are the alternatives ?

When I see certain things I ask myself: `who made this decision and why`.
I don't know if I have the answer to this, but I do not like the attitude.
If things are going to get worse, I will uninstall without looking back.
But it's a real shame.

This pattern has been emerging since the FaceBook acquisition,
so I would bet this is intentional, it's an attitude, it's a vision.

The intent is not to "play the evil mega-corp card",
I don't want to take them down,
it's that I would prefer to pay a decent annual fee to a great service rather than being used as a product.