WhatsApp is Bad, Move to Signal

WhatsApp is bad. WhatsApp is evil, and they do not deserve a spot in anybody’s lives. They hate their users.

Note that this article will contain swear words. If you can’t handle them, look away :)

TL;DR

WhatsApp is evil. Meta is evil. They steal your data, they have control over you. This is just a case study; for a change, use Signal.

Backstory.

Yesterday morning (13th May, around 9am GMT+8) I tried to create a new community on WhatsApp, on my desktop, for an up-and-coming mathematical society at my school.

This is completely fair. Nothing weird. Nothing suspicious. I create the community. No problem. But when I try to add an existing group chat, a feature given by WhatsApp, it says that there was some mysterious error, and that I could try again.

So I did. I tried again. And I got kicked back to the login screen on my computer. I check my phone, and see this:

WhatsApp suspended my account for doing absolutely nothing.

The rabbit hole

Nothing got better after that. I requested for help on the form they had provided. It said that it would take upwards of 24 hours, but only after around 8 hours was it restored.

In the meantime, I could not communicate with anybody. Nobody used Signal. Some of my friends do not use Instagram¹, therefore the only way I could communicate with them was through…SMS. Good-ol’ SMS saved the day, I was able to notify my mom and dad about the issue.

It was really baffling. I didn’t even do anything, what was WhatsApp going to say? What, I talked too much shit about them?

After a while, my account was restored. Apparently, they just fucked up! And that was good enough of an excuse to keep using their shitty bots to save costs, or something.

Prominently standing on the homescreen was a button. Verify account.

It kicked me back to the login screen, the typical login screen, where I was told to enter my phone number and go through the typical verification steps. Okay. Nothing seemed off…until…

Apparently, I was using a custom ROM…or maybe a hacked version of WhatsApp…or had a rooted phone. I HAD NONE OF THOSE THINGS! It’s baffling how horrible this proprietary piece of shitware is. I was on stock Android 16 Beta, on my Pixel 8a, without any software mods, with a locked bootloader.

E-mails to support

This is the part that infuriates me the absolute most.

I went on WhatsApp’s help page, in the app, accessible on the top right. I typed up my message, elaborating that I actually was NOT using a custom ROM or any modified software.

After my account was restored after it was falsely flagged as spam, I am unable to log back in I am not using a custom ROM, and I have tried both the official and play store builds of WhatsApp. What steps should I take to logging back in?

I sent it off, hoping I would get a reply within a few hours.

Hi,

Your attempt to register your phone number failed because you appear to be using an unofficial version of the WhatsApp app. We don’t support unofficial apps because they put your privacy and security at risk. They also put your data and device at the risk of malware.

Custom ROMs and rooted phones also aren’t supported by WhatsApp, learn more in this article.

What to do next

1. Save your chat history.
2. Uninstall the unofficial app.
3. Download WhatsApp or the WhatsApp Business app from official app stores or our website.
4. Register your phone number.

If you see an error that the app isn’t available in your country, visit this page to download WhatsApp.

Need more help?

• Try registering on a different phone.
• Upgrade the operating system on your phone.
• Troubleshoot why you can’t download or update WhatsApp.

That’s the reply I got. At first I thought,

Damn. Why is this guy on the support side so insanely illiterate?

Because they would have seemed very illiterate. I literally stated that I am not using a custom ROM, and whatnot. But no, this stupid person clearly did not read that I am not using one.

I sent a reply, like any sane person would, hoping that a person would answer.

Hi,

I am definitely using the official WhatsApp App, I have downloaded it from the play store. I am not using a custom ROM. This is an unmodified, unrooted, Google Pixel 8a on Android 15 beta. The APK on your website does not work. My phone is running the latest update.

I believe my phone number may be falsely detected as a toll-free number. When I try to enter my phone number on the mobile app, it spaces it out as XXX XXX XX__, and not XXXX XXXX, as per Singapore standards. However, it is not a toll-free number, I purchased this number from my carrier.

May I please have more assistance? It would be much appreciated. This issue occurred from after my account was falsely flagged for spam. I am trying to re-register my phone number at this stage.

Sincerely, Eason Qin

I got,

Hi,

Please contact us in our app

This enables us to collect information that’s necessary to understand and resolve your issue. Learn more.

Contact us

If you can’t contact us from the app, you can send us your question through our support form or browse our Help Center.

Thanks for your understanding and cooperation.

Mind you, no data had to be collected. All data was present, I had sent it in the same E-mail thread, and any sane human would be able to open the file, and read it.

I got the first reply. FOUR TIMES. In a row. Yes. I was convinced by the third time that it was an LLM, it clearly was; on the contact form on WhatsApp’s official website, it said that it might use Meta AI to answer my requests:

By continuing, you allow WhatsApp to review technical information about your account to help answer your question. Messages from WhatsApp Support may be generated by AI using a secure technology from Meta. Your personal messages and calls remain end-to-end encrypted.

Which it clearly did.

The crux of the issue

is that Meta is so damn lazy and incompetent that they cannot pull shit together to hire employees to respond to these E-mails. My situation clearly is unique. I am not using a custom ROM or anything, but I have been told that I am, and that meant that my chats weren’t secure anymore, not like they really are in the first place. They can decrypt them anytime².

In many of my requests I had included “I would like to speak to a human about this matter”, but to no avail. Instead, the same LLM, maybe even an Expert System³, would answer my messages, with the same response, accusing me of doing something I don’t do.

I tried every fix on the internet. On YouTube, on random tech websites; I even had to resort to random Indian/Indian-sounding tech guys who are known to post inaccurate content 50% of the time⁴, to no avail. And there are no manuals. No piece of documentation exists on this specific case of this issue, on an app that over 3 billion users use, per month!⁵. I am a programmer, I am used to reading manuals), because they actually help. But instead, all I get are stupid YouTube videos, stupid articles that were written by a chatbot, or stupid LLM E-mails.

I tried to contact them over Twitter⁶ (now known as X), and Instagram:

But to no avail.

And look at the same thread I tweeted on! Verified influencers flood the top:

and commoners like us, requesting for help, sit right below. No matter how hard Elon M*sk tries to hide it, we can see it.

There are more instances; I can’t get it to fit on one screenshot.

I also got no response on Instagram.

The harsh reality.

All WhatsApp cares for is money, publicity, and users to milk data from. We are not users. We are useds. We do not in fact use the software.

Think about it, we are not given any instructions to recover our accounts. We cannot talk to the company. We have no transparency as to how the operate. We are not given the source code of the app; if we had the damn source code, maybe I would have been able to read it. And maybe I would have been able to do all the debugging work for them.

But instead, WhatsApp controls us. They can mess up by banning innocent users, and not talking about it. They can force people to plead, disrupt lives, and communications. What happens if somebody was discussing an important business deal on their accounts, an important school event, or anything of the likes?

I hate to bring him up due to his status of possibly liking children, but the wise man Richard Stallman once said in his TEDx speech that having freedom over your software, i.e. you controlling it, is a human right. It indeed is, we should not be used like this by these companies, we should take control; our data is ours, the program deserves to be ours; nobody should be able to take it away from us.

I don’t want to rant about Free Software all that much, free as in freedom, not free beer. It is software that you own; you have access to the source code, you can study it, you can change it, you can reshare it, and you can use it however you want, how software is supposed to be.

Dissecting the WhatsApp ToS (Terms of Service)

It can be found at the following web link: https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/terms-of-service?lang=en, I may call it a EULA (you-lah), or end-user license agreement, too.

Here are some interesting things that it says:

• “We collect device and connection-specific information when you install, access, or use our Services.” This means that they can collect any information they want about your device, whenever the hell they feel like it. What phone you use, your operating system, your public IP, and even installed apps and such.
• “As part of the Facebook Companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information with, the other Facebook Companies.” This means that WhatsApp can share the data they collect to you to any other branch of facebook they want, whenever the hell they feel like it.
• “We may modify, suspend, or terminate your access to or use of our Services…” This means that they can do whatever the hell they want to your account, like suspending it for unjust reasons.

Basically, you don’t even own your own account. How lovely! It’s almost like you actually want to use it.

Other privacy concerns

WhatsApp also steals and sells your data whenever they feel like it. Of course, nobody will tell you this. Search engines have already been ce,nsored. This article is the tip of the iceberg, you can access it on https://removepaywalls.com if you don’t have a medium account.

No source will tell you the truth, that they could technically decrypt your chats and leak them. There is a reason that criminals don’t actually use WhatsApp, or journalists; because they know their data will be compromised and that they can be tracked. I can’t be assed to find 50 articles for you on this. However, a good starting point for your own discussion is that, if it’s so private, why can’t we prove it with cold, hard evidence, that being the code that WhatsApp runs on?

The solution

Use Signal.

This is the real deal, a genuinely private messenger. Private Android variants like CalyxOS use it, and there’s a reason. It was created by the original creator of WhatsApp, who left the company after it was bought by Facebook. Its encryption algorithms are identical to WhatsApp’s, which is a great starting point; they don’t actually collect your message metadata, and have better privacy practices.

Features are almost identical to WhatsApp’s. The apps are equally as polished. Communication is equally as good. There is no reason why you shouldn’t be using it. It is a truly private messenger that can’t just randomly terminate your account for no reason.

I’ve used Signal for years, and other privacy-respecting services. I don’t even use Google Drive for serious purposes, nor Google Workspace, I self-host Nextcloud and use LibreOffice for basic document processing on Linux. If you want to know what I really use, you can comment below.

The truth is that I am not a criminal, in fact, I don’t have anything major to hide. It’s just that I do not want to feel watched and controlled; this is the perfect case study. I am exhausted. I sat a bunch of exams, and as of writing this article, I am both infuriated and sleepy. I got my account back, after FACTORY RESETTING MY PHONE 4 TIMES AND LOCKING THE BOOTLOADER, which is something I should not have had to do, but I had to, thanks to Meta.

Don’t accuse me of being a cybercriminal, a hacker, or a terrorist; I’ve been called suspicious since Grade 7 and I’m tired of hearing it. Do you want your neighbors to know your exact activity and position, if you’re wearing clothes, showering, or sleeping naked? They don’t know all my secrets; but if Meta can point a telescope at my digital life that they promise is private (it’s not), and my neighbors can’t, this makes no sense. It is eerie knowing someone can detect your messaging patterns and what you say, at any time, with this data being sold to actual cybercriminals.

Liberate yourselves. Start with a better chat app. Use Signal.