What’s everyone’s opinion on this? Is it a good or bad thing? It’s good, people can ditch WhatsApp and might be easier to convince people to leave it behind altogether. Bad - I can’t imagine that meta do anything without something being in it for them.
Could this potentially help meta scrape information from other messengers?
Could the likes of signal make it optional for the user, whether or not they want to be able to chat across the different messengers…
No I have not.
You will only use one client app. The one you trust the most. One opensource, trusted and having its code regularly independently audited - like Signal. So in general this will improve my security.
Even if you account my contacts are using the official whatsapp app, that cannot be trusted since it is not audited by public.
Previously I had to use Whatsapp app to to talk with them. Not the other way around. So if Whatsapp app is backdoored this does not reduce security at all. While it improves convenience by a lot.
But now is way easier for me to convince my contacts to use apps that can be trusted. which will reduce the chance of my communication being backdoored and increase my security.
ah I see where our views split. I just told people what app to find me on and I’d rather call or write mail than use whatsapp for a tidbid of convenience.
So from my pov the interop will reduce security. From your pov it will be at worst equally insecure.