Following the controversial announcement of an update to its terms and services that got users fearing for the privacy of their online conversations, social media giant WhatsApp has reportedly lost millions of its users to rival platforms.
Described as “the largest digital migration in human history”, the loss has put a dent in the company’s plans and delayed the implementation of its new privacy policy by another three months.
WhatsApp’s loss is even more staggering when one considers the stats. Within a week, global downloads shrank from 11.3 million to 9.2 million. In the United Kingdom, WhatsApp went from being the eighth most downloaded app to the 23rd in a space of fewer than two weeks.
Experiencing contrasting fortunes, Signal, a rival app, went from not being in the top 1,000 of the most downloaded apps to becoming the number one app in the country within a three-day span. In the first three weeks of January, it gained 7.5 million new users all over the world, an influx that caused the app’s servers to crash for a few days.
In India, Signal’s downloads were at 12,000 the week before WhatsApp announced the new policy. The week after, it had climbed to 2.7 million. In two weeks, global downloads skyrocketed by 9,493%.
Another rival app, Telegram, has even more impressive numbers, gaining 25 million users in just 72 hours and recording a 500% growth. This brings Telegram’s total users to 500 million as the app enjoys the largest influx of users in its seven-year history.
Offering an explanation for the sudden shift towards Telegram, the app’s founder Pavel Durov noted that customers are getting more sensitive about privacy concerns.
Also Read: WhatsApp might stop working on your phone soon. Here’s why.
“People no longer want to exchange their privacy for free services. They no longer want to be held hostage by tech monopolies that seem to think they can get away with anything as long as their apps have a critical mass of users,” he said.
WhatsApp’s Boycott
On January 7, CEO of Tesla Inc. Elon Musk made a tweet containing the words, “Use Signal”, to his 43.1 million followers amidst calls to boycott WhatsApp.
Musk’s endorsement of the rival app also brought media attention back to the previous endorsements of WhatsApp’s competitors by influential tech figures like Edward Snowden, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, and Oscar-winning media mogul, Laura Poitras.
The pressure was intensified when it was announced that Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Turkey’s Recep Erdogan had migrated to Telegram, joining other world leaders France’s Emmanuel Macron and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
In an ironic twist, one of the biggest champions of the shift from WhatsApp to Signal is WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton. After clashing with Zuckerberg over the latter’s supposed plans to merge users’ data with Facebook’s, Acton left WhatsApp in 2017 and five months later, he invested $50 million into Signal. He has since been pushing for users to abandon their patronage of his former company.
The press does not appear to be on WhatsApp’s side either. Global media outlets such as Forbes, Independent UK, and The Guardian recently published articles that portrayed WhatsApp’s new update as problematic, contributing to the company’s ongoing image crisis.
The Facebook Problem
Being acquired by Facebook in 2014 meant that the app also inherited the tech giants’ notoriety for disregarding users’ privacy. Mired in such controversies as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company has a bad reputation concerning its handling of users’ data. In 2019, the social network was set to pay a $5 billion fine for violating 87 million consumers’ privacy, the highest of such fines in history.
WhatsApp’s proximity to that also means it attracted the same distrust as to its parent company. So, when it announced a poorly explained policy that had to do with people’s private communication, the public reaction was to flee before demanding any further explanation.
Also Read: Actions: Beyond the Nigerian Data Protection Regulations (NDPR) 2019
To make matters worse, Facebook’s media releases have only fanned the flames of the rumors that the endgame for WhatsApp, which is not directly profitable at the moment, is the purpose of clandestine data mining.
In an address published on his Facebook page back in 2019, Zuckerberg revealed that the long-term plan for WhatsApp is to bring it to the point of “interoperability” with Facebook. This means one would be able to use WhatsApp to receive Facebook messages without giving out one’s number.
For this to happen, of course, at least some form of data would need to be shared constantly between both apps. It is clear that Facebook’s history of encroaching into users’ personal space is a red flag for those paying attention.
