WhatsApp is rolling out ads. In an update on Monday, Meta announced that it will now show ads from businesses through its Stories-like status feature.
Meta says it will tailor the ads to your interests by using “limited” information, including your country or city, language, the channels you follow, and how you interact with ads on the platform. You can also change your ad preferences from Meta’s Accounts Center.
This isn’t the only change Meta is making to WhatsApp. The company will also start showing promoted channels when you click on the Explore button to find new ones to follow. It’s also rolling out the ability to subscribe to channels to “receive exclusive updates” as well.
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I literally just got my senior citizen dad off Skype and over to WhatsApp like 2 years ago… Ain’t no way I can get him over to signal
“We will never show you ads in WhatsApp. We promise”. --Facebook when they bought WhatsApp and promised the previous owner not to force ads in the app…
I wonder if anyone believed them at the time
Facebook shit gonna do facebook shit
I’m forced to use WhatsApp chat so I keep it installed begrudgingly. But who the fuck is using WhatsApp stories?
I use Beeper which shows me a unified view of whatsapp and Signal and others. whatsapp itself has zero permissions on my phone. I hate that I need to have it at all but Europe is deep into that. Sigh.
There was a big uproar amongst normies when the WhatsApp TOS changed…but people forget quickly and prefer convenience. That was our one chance to convert everyone over.
But then aren’t you trusting your credentials to yet another application? That seems like a bad idea…
If thats not a reason to switch to Signal what is.
But people just suck it up anyway, they did when reddit gone to shit, they did when Amazon startes showing ads even tho when you were paying, they did when Netflix disallowed sharing and you had to pay extra.
People just suck up whatever is thrown at them and are fucking stupid.
We cant have nice things, because companies will greed and if users dont react and cancel the shit out of them they and others will continue to press more moneyjuice out of people.
Sheep don’t know they are being slaughtered. We’re the digital 1% and we can’t make the sheep wake up.
I don’t use either but my issue with Signal is none of my friends want another application to install and they are happy with WhatApp.
Conversely, I’m happy not having a group chat app and will either text you or iMessage you. Don’t you dare ring me as I ain’t answering.
I only use WhatsApp for work and none of my coworkers are switching off it. They have too much invested in it. Family specifically.
Meta has been running ads claiming no one can read your WhatsApp messages, including them. For some reason, I’m not 100% sure about this. It’s hard to imagine they can resist grabbing all that data for their AI somehow.
Of course they fucking grab it. They have 45 backdoors with golden handles otherwise they’re show the fucking source
I wished Whatsapp wasn’t a thing so much. There are so many so much better apps. Signal is so much better and it would work fine for the vast majority of people.
Unfortunately “better” varies from person to person. Signal is behind on features, e.g. WhatsApp has integration for businesses (customer support).
I hope my monthly donation will help but we must realize for some some features are important, I guess that for most it’s how many ppl they know is there/unwilling to lead a migration
Seems like I’m not in the target audience for these ads. I have absolutely zero clue what any of the things mentioned above are. I use WhatsApp to send messages.
*gasp*
Who could have ever seen this move coming? From Facebook, of all companies!
To be fair, I am shocked… Not to see a Pikachu face in the comments.
whatsapp-free since 2023!
Good news good Signal.
Only if you donate. Otherwise bad news, Signal.
Have they removed that dogshit crypto they added a few years ago? Haven’t donated since.
Signal was never more than a stepping stone anyway. Centralised privacy services, that can be taken down by any government, are doomed to fail under surveillance capitalfascism.
It’s still there, buried in the settings. TBF I wouldn’t expect them to remove it, because some people probably do use it.
No idea, all I see as options now for Paypal and credit card.
I recommend https://simplex.chat/
I recommend you have a look at this guy’s Twitter profile and reconsider.
What does this mean? What’s on his twitter profile?
Only shocking part of this is that it took them this long.
This is one of the train that impossible for me to get off. It is very ubiquitous in my country to use whatsapp instead of text. I must suck it up I guess. 😅
Be the change
A fair number of my contacts from countries where this is true also have Signal. If you don’t, I suggest installing it and seeing how many people are there.
If it’s hard to remember who uses what, start conversations from the contacts app instead of one of the messaging apps; in most cases it will tell you.
Already did that months ago when they change the term of services and people are aware of it at the time. Many install Signal, tried them, signal got overloaded, experience degraded, people are back to Whatsapp. Now only dead account are there. Telegram is more popular but that is just jumping from crocodile’s mouth to shark’s.
Government agencies, company customee services all relies on Whatsapp. They have emails but if you want to get response in timely manners, Whatsapp is the way to go (Or twitter, again another bad alternatives).
At least it is still E2E (supposedly), so it is not all bad. Look, I know I sound pessimistic because I am (at least in this specific topic). I hope everyone else can do better than me, cheers!
signal got overloaded, experience degraded
I did not experience this, and I’ve been using Signal daily for years. Prior to 2020 or so, I experienced more unreliability and hesitated to recommend it to the average person.
I’m familiar with the problem though; in most of the EU and probably other places WhatsApp usage is so high that it’s a major inconvenience to avoid it entirely.
Government agencies…relies on Whatsapp
WTF!? What country is that?
I’d hazard a guess that it’s Brazil.
It may not fit your exact needs, but my solution to WhatsApp and fb messenger is to bridge them with a beeper account. Of course you lose the calling ability, but if you’re not using it for calls it is a good enough solution. The other caveat (at least with fb messenger) is you still need to check on your actual account if you get any legit messages from someone not on your list.
This might be good middle ground. The last time I tried beeper, the apps is kinda … suck tho. Well, at least it not full of ads!
Does it still require user to install their desktop app first?
Not that I’m aware of, never even knew it was ever a requirement. I’ve only used the android client and the browser client. For whatever reason they don’t really communicate the browser is out there for use. It’s chat.beeper.com for anyone looking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9Ux8DFgMSM
Might give you some ideas on how to do that
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The most important people in my life is my family, especially my parents. Teaching them to try new app to chat to me is easy enough but all of their friends and groups are still on whatsapp.
Making them juggle between two apps (separating how they interact to me and totheir friends) is not easy. Justifying it is even harder, they simply don’t care (to understand) the implication.
Rather than make them confused and worried about not being able to contact me, I just have to accept the status quo. It is the conclusion I arrive at.
Must be nice tho to not use any Meta product. :)
Hopefully this helps people move off of WhatsApp to Signal or something else.
Yeah like it moved them off of Xitter, Reddit, Facebook and Instagram.
Hope so… Just a little bit and them another ones when they extent the implementation of IA… And wishing to not be the standard any more
I just wish SMS would go away.
Why? It works fine and it’s built into the phones. No need to convince family members to install a fuckin’ chat app just to be able to message them.
I’m more surprised it took them this long. Thankfully there are already many decent alternative messaging apps.
but still nobody is going to switch. whenever i try to convince people to switch, they just defend whatsapp and I’m a whiner
Or they do switch but for like 1 day and then go back to messaging you on WhatsApp. I tried switching to signal at least a couple times, even convinced a couple groups to move, but not a single chat lasted more than a couple weeks. Eventually they all went back to WhatsApp. Every single one. It’s extremely difficult to get people to care.
