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From political coups to family feuds
how WhatsApp became our favourite way to chat
Saner, Emine http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/03/from-political-coups-to-family-feuds-how-whatsapp-became-our-favourite-way-to-chat
Publisher: The Guardian
Date Written: 03/07/2016
Year Published: 2016
Resource Type: Article
How the WhatsApp messaging app has grown in popularity due to it's security and privacy benefits.
Abstract:
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Excerpts:
Just a few years old, with barely 50 employees, WhatsApp has become one of the most important in the world, and its decisions about the way it is run will have a huge influence on us. In April, WhatsApp announced it was to use end-to-end encryption across its service, meaning a message can only be read by its recipient - not by the authorities, and not even by the company itself, which would prevent it getting into the kind of privacy fight with the FBI that Apple recently went through.
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Daniel Miller, professor of anthropology at University College London and director of the social media research project Why We Post, says apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat are an antidote to the large broadcast-style platforms of Facebook and Twitter. "In every society, people use [social media] differently but, on the whole, you can say that, whereas Facebook has become this public arena, where people are really thinking about how they look to the general public, WhatsApp has brought in smaller groups who can talk more privately." The biggest group users, he says with a small laugh, are not politicians (not even those plotting against their leader). "It’s probably families. Say a baby has been born, and the immediate relatives can’t get enough pictures of the baby - it really suits that kind of group."
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