Why I won't use WhatsApp

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In a word - well, 8 words, actually - because I respect the privacy of my friends.

When it comes to WhatsApp, my contacts can be broken down into two main groups: those who use WhatsApp already and those who don't.

Those who do use WhatsApp have already handed over their contact details voluntarily to Meta, WhatsApp's parent company. Those who don't use WhatsApp have not.

Now, WhatsApp is almost unusable without access to the contacts stored in your phone. It can't let you choose the recipient of the message you want to send by tapping on their name from the contacts, you have to find and enter their number manually. Nor can it identify the sender of a message that you received without cross-referencing it with the numbers in your contacts.

If given access to your contacts, WhatsApp will upload them to Meta to check whether any of them are already WhatsApp users.

Let me repeat that: WhatsApp will upload the details of all of your contacts to Meta.

What right do I have to hand over the contact details of people who trust me with them without their consent?

Meta has defended this practice in the past by saying that the actual personal information associated with each contact is not submitted to Meta but undergoes a one-way hash first. With this initial step, Meta never sees your contacts' personal info, only a cryptographic hash of that info that can't be transformed back to the original. What they do see is the fact that there is a relationship between you and those contacts, and who knows what they can infer from that and other information they could hold on you all?

The Terms of Service that you agree to as a WhatsApp user include a clause saying that WhatsApp will behave assuming that you have the consent of your contacts to submit their data to Meta, thus leaving the preservation of their privacy up to you and absolving themselves of any breach thereof.

European and UK data protection authorities have not fully accepted Meta's arguments. In 2021, WhatsApp was hit with a record €225 million fine by its lead EU regulator, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC). While the fine was primarily for a lack of transparency (failing to clearly explain its data processing practices to both users and non-users) it shows how seriously regulators take these obligations. The core issue of contact syncing was a key part of that investigation.

This is apparently a legal grey area. While Meta uses cryptographic hashing as a technical defence and its Terms of Service as a legal shield to place the onus on the user, regulators remain sceptical. If, like me, you're wondering what right you have to upload your friends' contact details to Meta, you are not misinterpreting the law. You are identifying a fundamental conflict between how a major tech platform operates and the core principles of consent and data privacy enshrined in UK and EU law.

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