At an early hour of the morning, Tesla & SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted “Use Signal” — the precursor for this tweet was an earlier reply to WhatsApp’s recent policy that forcefully asks to comply to data sharing with Facebook.
WhatsApp is actually owned by Facebook Inc. (FB), now Facebook is apparently trying to widen its human data research to the next level. With the past scandals like Cambridge Analytica, the social media platform’s credibility has been shaken.
Interestingly, the Cambridge Analytica scandal surfaced within a few weeks after Elon Musk ordered to remove SpaceX, Tesla, and his official page from Facebook. Musk has been a staunch opposer of Facebook and regularly criticizes the social media platform for bad user experience and possible misuse of personal data.
In the new WhatsApp terms of use agreement (screenshot above), it’s clearly mentioned that if you do not agree with Facebook data sharing otherwise you will not be granted permission to use WhatsApp (a little rephrased I know but that’s what Facebook meant actually).
Now with WhatsApp’s mandatory data sharing with Facebook, Elon Musk decided to give a boost to Signal Private Messenger. As of this writing, Signal Messenger 570k+ users on Google Playstore vs. 127 million+ WhatsApp users. With Musk’s more than 41 million followers on Twitter, the number of Signal users is likely to hike in the coming hours, days, and weeks.
Another interesting bit is that Elon Musk has now become the world’s richest person with Tesla stock reaching an all-time high of $796.12 ($3,980.6 pre-split) at the time of this writing.
However, Signal offers real end-to-end encryption for enhanced security and privacy. Signal Messenger has no social media partners to share data for profit and that’s even better.
The dilemma is, how we are going to convince our friends and family to migrate to Signal when they are addicted to WhatsApp, I don’t see that happening very soon.
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