WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

There’s something particularly paternalistic about this statement from the PM: “Your personal messages, calls and statuses, they will remain end-to-end encrypted”.

Any man who must say, "I am the King", is no true king.

Any tech company who must say, "we don't harvest your information", is a tech company that harvests your information.

Signal also claims the same:

> We can't read your messages or listen to your calls, and no one else can either.

Should we be suspicious of Signal as well?

Sure you should be suspicious. You should always be suspicious. Especially if it's free. And you can do something to calm your suspicions. Like checking out Signlas Open Source code.

>Like checking out Signlas Open Source code.

What's preventing them from serving a backdoored version? xz was open source as well, that didn't stop the backdoor. There might be reproducible builds on android, but you can't even inspect the executable on iOS without jailbreaking.

You can instead install a FOSS fork of Signal like Molly [1] built by F-Droid directly from the source code

[1] https://molly.im/

Isn’t that against Signal’s terms of service? Won’t they ban you?

It is neither against the signal software’s license, nor it is against the signal service’s terms of service.

This is a false meme spread because the Signal founder (who is no longer with the company) didn’t like people making forks without changing the API server URL and running their own servers.

Open source software doesn’t work like that, however.