Leaving Big Tech might not always seem easy at first. Where do you begin, and what are actually good alternatives? To help you on your way, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide with alternatives. Here you can find all the steps.

 

Many Dutch people use Whatsapp for their *instant messaging*. According to us, Signal is the better option. Signal offers everything that you expect from a chat app, but without the drawback of Big Tech's WhatsApp.

Signal protects your privacy

Signal does not save any unnecessary data en uses only what is strictly necessary to send messages. The same can not be said about Whatsapp. Meta (the company behind WhatsApp) collects metadata, including data about the date and time, frequently and length of your activities on Whatsapp, but also about your groups and your profile picture. We suspect that Meta uses this information to profile its users for advertisements on their other platforms.

Signal is open source

Signal is transparent and open source. This means that everyone can check the source code of the app, which creates transparancy and safety. You can look 'below the hood' of the app and see exactly what happens with your data. Whatsapp isn't open source, which means that no one knows for sure what the app does with your data.

Signal is a non profit organisation

Signal stays afloat through donations and the company does not make any profit. Signal does not use adverticements and does not *track* its users. On te other hand, the more Meta knows about you, the more targeted the content is they show you. It gives them a better chance that you will believe what they show you or that you will click on the advertisements. These 'personalized' advertisements manipulate users.

Signal is encrypted

Whatsapp and Signal do both use end-to-end encryption which means that no one can read the content of your messages. But Signals protection goes further. The app has an extremely safe encryption protocol that guarantees that both your old and your future messages can not be read by anyone other than you. This makes Signal an safe and privacy friendly choice.

However, Signal is, just like WhatsApp, an American company and runs on an American server. This is not ideal and leads to some vulnerabilities. One of them is the scaling down or even turning off completely of Signal's infrastructure, through pressure from the government. That would mean Signal would not work properly anymore, or even at all. The vulnerability is mostly the accessibility of the provider. The integrity of the messages, if the encryption can be broken or the messages can be changed, is not extra vulnerable. The messages have end-to-end encryption and can not be intercepted.

Because messages go via their infrastructure, technically Signal can see who communicates with whom and when. Signal says: we do not save that metadata. That means that Signal can never provide those historical records to anyone, like Meta does with Whatsapp. In theory, an authority could ask Signal to save and provide the metadata from now on. It seems very unlikely to us that Signal would adhere to such a request.

Threema

We also considered recommending the Swiss open source alternative Threema. Why we ended up not recommending it? First of all, it is a payed platform, which seemed, to us, a big obstacle for people to switch. It is important, especially with messaging apps, that as many people as possible use the same app, so people can actually use it to communicate with each other. Secondly, Signal seems to have a safer encryption protocol than Threema, although not all experts agree on this. An upside of Threema is that it is hosted in Switserland and that you do not need a phone number to register.

So, ask your friends and family to join you in the switch to Signal! It is a safe messaging platform, without advertisements and without build-in AI.