Up till a week ago, 67-year-old Snehlata Patel believed that WhatsApp was the only possible way in which she could share jokes and other me...
Up till a week ago, 67-year-old Snehlata Patel believed that WhatsApp was the only possible way in which she could share jokes and other messages with her friends, or have “free” video calls with her relatives. Since Saturday, however, she has spent hours glued to her phone, struggling to familiarise herself with Signal – a messenger app to which many in her “school friends” WhatsApp group were moving.
“All weekend, my friends had been forwarding messages from their children about how WhatsApp is taking private data from our phones,” said Patel, a retired bank clerk from Mumbai. “I had never heard of Signal, but my own son said he has shifted to it, so I asked him to put it on my phone.”
Patel is not alone – she is one of 1.2 million people who have downloaded Signal since the start of 2021, at the same time that WhatsApp saw an 11% decline in its weekly downloads. Telegram, another messenger app, has also seen a surge in new users, with 1.7 million downloads since January 1.
Concerns about data privacy with respect to WhatsApp are not new – the app has run into controversies about user data shared with its parent company, Facebook, ever since it was...
