If you want your messages encrypted, do it yourself. Then you are in control, not some big corp.
Nobody has to use these platforms, unless everyone else is using these platforms.
Have you ever been that one person who is being regularly invited to an event but you aren't in a Messenger or Whatsapp group to receive it? Pretty soon you stop receiving invitations. This is actually worse in the case of Whatsapp outside America, since it's used more often than it should for business, and if you don't make yourself accessible for business, you don't eat.
>If you want your messages encrypted, do it yourself.
I've been "that guy" trying to tell others about PGP. I still get jokes about acting like I'm hiding from the FBI occasionally, even in this age where privacy is mainstream enough where I can point them to a Joe Rogan podcast featuring Edward Snowden. People care, but it has to be frictionless.
No, even if everybody else is using those platforms, it does not force you in anyway to use them. It's still always up to you.
Well, you're wrong. I've had interviewers ask why I host my own blog instead of using Facebook, and said it was very unusual that they couldn't check out my social background.
And Craiglist rental ads often screen applicants using social media, usually Facebook.
Well, why would an employer need to check your social background? They should care about your skills more than anything else.
Thus said, a call to previous employers should do the trick.
Personally I'm on no social network, on purpose. I've never had any issues. If it was an issue for an employer that I didn't have a Facebook account that their issue not mine.
I don’t know what it’s like where you are (or what it’s like where I am now), but in the U.K. references from a previous employer are limited to confirming that a person worked at a place between specific dates.
This is because everyone gets legal advice warning they may be sued for libel if they either say anything negative or have a policy of saying nothing only for bad employees.
I don’t know how likely the scenario is, but everywhere I’ve worked before I left the U.K. shared that policy and that reasons.
I don’t want to work in an office with an unrepentant violent criminal or vigorous racist. Irrespective of their skill.
Example: Donald Knuth doesn't use email. This works fine for him because of his reputation, but if I were to quit email and social networks, I'm not influential enough that people would send me snail mail.