Someone drops a link in a chat: “I made a WhatsApp group for this, join here.” A school project, a street party, a daycare parents exchange, yet another neighbourhood initiative. Within a minute fifteen people are in, photos are flowing, and the thing basically organizes itself. I get it. WhatsApp is super easy. You install it once, it finds everyone you know, and it removes almost all the friction of getting a group of people talking.

That ease is exactly why it has become the default for everything. Nobody sat down and weighed the options. They picked it because it was already there and everyone was already on it. I have done the same plenty of times.

What I keep wishing is that choosing a more private option was just as easy. Most of the time it isn’t, so the easy thing wins again and we all add one more group to the pile. This post is my small attempt to slow that down for a moment, before the next group gets made.

Why should you consider something else?

  • Start with the simplest thing. The moment you are added to a group, your phone number is visible to everyone else in it. People you have never really met now have your private number, permanently, and there is no taking it back. For a group that is literally “all the parents in the Gruppe,” that is a lot of near-strangers holding a direct line to you. The German data protection authorities have landed on this point repeatedly: for clubs, schools, and small organizations, this kind of exposure makes WhatsApp generally hard to use lawfully.

  • Then there is your address book. WhatsApp reads the entire thing and uploads it to its servers, which means it collects details about people who never agreed to anything, including people who do not even use WhatsApp. The Bavarian data protection authority puts it about as plainly as a regulator ever does: because those contacts are handed over without their consent, a compliant setup generally cannot be argued. Your aunt who isn’t on WhatsApp is in their system because you are.

  • Also, let’s talk about where it all goes. WhatsApp sends data to servers in the United States, which European courts have ruled doesn’t meet the protection our law requires. And “end-to-end encrypted,” the phrase everyone leans on, only covers the contents of your messages. Who you talk to, how often, and when still flows to Meta and gets shared across its companies. For a thread about who is bringing cake on Friday, that is a surprising amount of quiet data collection happening in the background.

The part I find hardest to defend is that nobody in the group can actually honour the basic rights we all have under the law: to know what is stored about us, and to have it deleted when we want to. WhatsApp has already been fined for failing exactly these transparency duties, and the German authorities’ guidance keeps circling back to the same concerns. Once a conversation about your colleagues has spread across a group, that control is simply gone.

None of this means you have done something wrong by being on WhatsApp. Most of us are, me included. It means that when we start something new, we have a real choice, and the convenient default isn’t the only one on the table.

The alternative

The one I would actually suggest is Signal. It looks and works almost exactly like WhatsApp, so there is nothing new to learn and nothing to relearn for the less technical people in the group. It is free, it is run by a non-profit instead of an advertising company, and it doesn’t hoover up your address book. It even uses the same underlying encryption WhatsApp borrowed, just inside an app anyone can inspect. For most groups the switch costs one slightly annoying evening and nothing after that.

(If anyone wants to go further, with no phone number attached and servers in Switzerland, Threema does that. It costs a few euros and fewer people have it, so I would treat it as the enthusiast option rather than the default.)

Add me though!

So before the next group gets spun up: could we try Signal instead? I will happily walk anyone through setting it up, it takes about ten minutes. I would much rather spend those ten minutes than keep handing everyone’s phone number and every photo of our kids to a company that has already been fined hundreds of millions of euros for exactly this kind of thing.

And if you were about to send me a WhatsApp invite: I hope you understand why I have to decline.