After WhatsApp blundered by releasing a privacy policy update which appeared to have ordered users to endorse the sharing of their information with Facebook or leave the app, the company is having trouble stopping millions of angry users from flocking to the competition.
WhatsApp said it is going to delay enforcing the privacy update till May in the hopes that it would have sufficiently convinced users on why they should not leave.
“The update does not change WhatsApp’s data-sharing practices with Facebook and does not impact how people communicate privately with friends or family wherever they are in the world,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told BusinessDay. “WhatsApp remains deeply committed to protecting people’s privacy. We are communicating directly with users through WhatsApp about these changes, so they have time to review the new policy over the course of the next month.”
Unfortunately for the messaging platform with 2 billion users, migration is growing larger by the day.
Pavel Durov, the Russian founder of Telegram said the platform surpassed 500 million monthly active users in the first week of January, and more people keep coming. In three days alone, Telegram welcomed 25 million new users from across the globe – 38 percent from Asia; 27 percent from Europe; 21 percent from Latin America; and 8 percent from the Middle East and North Africa.
Signal is also seeing more love with 7.5 million downloads globally through the Apple App Store and Google Play store between January 6 and January 10, according to Sensor Tower. It is the highest week or even monthly install number for Signal in the app’s history.
Adam Blacker, Vice President of Apptopia, said Signal was downloaded more than Telegram across Apple and Google stores for the first time ever on Wednesday, 12 January 2021.
Telegram’s Durov says the exodus from WhatsApp is because 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,” Durov said in a post on Tuesday.
WhatsApp released a statement last week to explain the update, but for millions of its users, it might have come to a tad too late.
Here is how Telegram and Signal compare to WhatsApp and why many users may be dumping the latter for good:
Security
Like WhatsApp recently found out, security is the most important feature users can ask for.
Social media security breaches have the potential to cause up to $6 billion in cybercrime damages by 2021, according to a report by Thycotic and Cybersecurity Ventures. The report found that over 3 billion user credentials and passwords were stolen in 2016, which meant that criminals hacked and stole 8.2 million passwords per day, or approximately 95 passwords stolen every second.
For many experts, WhatsApp really had it together until it tangled with Facebook. Currently, WhatsApp collects about 16 data points from the latest updates it has to share with Facebook companies.
Telegram and Signal do not share data with a third party and do not collect as much as 16 data points like WhatsApp.
Telegram collects only 3 data points, Signal makes use of linked data and only stores your phone number.
WhatsApp and Signal make use of the same encryption protocol. The difference is that Signal’s encryption is open source, meaning it can be examined for vulnerabilities by security researchers. WhatsApp, on the other hand, uses its own proprietary deployment and it is not open source.
The three platforms support self disappearing messages.
Some experts say Telegram can technically access a user’s message given that the MTProto, the encryption protocol used by Telegram is – like WhatsApp – proprietary and only partly open-source.
Sunday Alawode, a software programmer, told BusinessDay he uses Signal to chat with fellow programmers and foreign clients because of the high security. Signal allows you to relay voice calls to its servers so your identity remains concealed from your contacts. The feature is somewhat similar to what a VPN does.
Groups
WhatsApp groups have a capacity of 256 users.
Telegram, however, brings support for groups with up to 200,000 members. The interesting part of Telegram group chats is the multiple group-specific features like bots, polls, quizzes, hashtags, among others that make users’ experience in groups a lot more fun. The large group capacity also means it is possible to get lost in the conversation.
Creating groups on Signal is a lot different from WhatsApp and Telegram. While you can broadcast messages to multiple contacts at once in a group, you don’t have the option to do this on Signal. But to compensate, Signal recently added a feature that allows group video calls. WhatsApp’s video calls allow 8 users per time.
Users can also export their group chats from WhatsApp to Signal using a feature on the settings. You can migrate as many group chats as you want.
“I successfully migrated four group chats from WhatsApp to Signal (including my family),” said a new user, @anazhqan on Twitter.
File sharing
On WhatsApp, photos, videos, and audio files can be shared up to 16MB. It also allows you to share all sorts of files and documents up to 100MB.
The size limit for sharing files on Telegram is 1.5GB.
You can send files of all kinds on Signal securely. Signal by default also encrypts all the local files with a 4-digit passphrase.
