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Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

Is WhatsApp still requiring access to your phone's address book before it allows you to use it? It did last time I tried it. There is no chance in hell I'm giving it all the phone numbers, emails and names of people that trusted me by giving me their details. At the time I set up a virtual android environment (samsung called it knox) just to setup WhatsApp in a way it couldn't access my phone's address book. It is extremely unethical on Meta's side to continue with this requirement. So I'm dubious every te they're presented as champions of privacy protection.

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> There is no chance in hell I'm giving it all the phone numbers, emails and names of people that trusted me by giving me their details.

The sad thing is that all their details and yours are already known to Meta.

The dozen of us who behave like you will keep trying though.

I currently have WhatsApp installed without access to my address book (on Android). It doesn't require it, but it makes it harder to use and locks out some features. Among other things, you can't start a new group / direct message, but you can participate / reply if someone else messages you first.

I use an app called "Open In WhatsApp" which lets you paste / write a phone number and it will open a conversation with that number (by using android intents). You can also share contacts from the Phone app to this App, so you don't have to copy/paste manually.

https://github.com/SubhamTyagi/openinwa (I recommend downloading from f-droid)

If only there were a strong, centralized app store that could perform app review and prevent applications from degrading user experience beyond the extent actually necessary without that permission.

Good thing the EU just outlawed that model and forced everyone to support "third party app stores" that are thinly-veiled shells for Facebook/Google/etc to bypass that review process.

the "I wanna sideload" crowd are nothing more than allies of convenience for FB and others. Facebook was already experimenting with getting users to manually sideload the full-telemetry build and now they can just say "oops not supported on safari, install the native app".

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...

I recently had to install whatsapp. No asking for contacts at all. The web app (via a qr code) is ok, and i run that in a vm set up just for wa. I don't let friends and fam know i have it...I prefer keeping out of dramas, 'news', and memes. I did check that i do not appear as 'x is online' on anyone's phone (but only checked with the person i needed to wa with). The app isn't bad, tbf. It's just not for me.

It's kinda the point of WhatsApp tho, phone features using your phone number and phone book but over the internet.

The Phone app on my iPhone manages to do all of those things without uploading my contacts list/social graph to anybody else’s servers though.

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