Large number of Indians, old and young, have already been testing out messenger apps like Signal and Telegram this week.

A guy poses having a smartphone in front of displayed Whatsapp logo design in this example. | Dado Ruvic/Reuters

Up till this morning, 67-year-old Snehlata Patel believed that WhatsApp had been really the only possible means in which she could share jokes along with other communications along with her buddies, or have actually “free” video calls with her family members. Since Saturday, but, she’s invested hours glued to her phone, struggling to familiarise by herself with Signal – a messenger software to which numerous inside her “school buddies” WhatsApp team had been moving.

“All week-end, my buddies have been forwarding communications from kids on how WhatsApp is using personal information from our phones,” said Patel, a resigned bank clerk from Mumbai. “ we experienced never ever been aware of Signal, but my son that is own said has shifted to it, therefore I asked him to place it back at my phone.”

Patel just isn’t alone – she actually is certainly one of 1.2 million individuals who have installed Signal because the beginning of 2021, in the exact same time that WhatsApp saw an 11% decrease in its regular packages. Telegram, another messenger application, in addition has seen a rise in brand new users, with 1.7 million packages since 1 january.

Issues about information privacy with regards to WhatsApp aren’t new – the application has encounter controversies about individual information distributed to its moms and dad business, Twitter, from the time it absolutely was obtained by Twitter Inc in 2014. Читать далее →