I lived in Latin America for a year. It is shocking how much everything relies on WhatsApp. I got everything from visa appointments, airline tickets, to restaurant bookings in WhatsApp.
Huge national security in my view.
Another massive problem is if Meta has a fit with your organization, they can ban you from using WhatsApp for Business. All these Latam countries should and must pass regulations to avoid this kind of behavior. Free market all you want but if you captured market, it’s the nation’s responsibility to ensure their people can get the best service even if these companies are hating each other.
It was kind of the same but not as pervasive with Facebook Messenger in the Philippines.
There's a reason South Korea has laws requiring all data on its citizens and geography to be stored in Korea. Even Google Maps doesn't quite work in Korea.
Issues that threaten national security are issues that threaten a nation’s sovereignty, put it at risk of war, or compromise the security of high ranking politicians, members of a nation’s intelligence service, military assets, and other issues of that caliber. The potential to miss flights or health care appointments does not rise to that level, but if it’s an actual problem, then it’s something solvable without reaching for the anti-monopoly gun or national security gun and a good start would be governments not using WhatsApp as an exclusive mechanism for obtaining government services. The second step is governments mandating that businesses in healthcare or transportation and other such critical industries have alternative mechanisms for customers to reach them other than WhatsApp.
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/society/20251009/rec...
The pernicious thing that neutralizes many people like yourself, is that you cannot understand that meta/Facebook/WhatsApp is not just innocuous private business somehow magically different than the government in which at least you have a theoretical level of control over in a democracy.
Every place that an “American” company controls aspects of a technology inside a society is effectively to that degree conquered by the “USA”. One’s own country simply does not exist anymore to the same qualitative degree that it is controlled by foreign technologies/companies. That is also the revealing argument the system made when it threw its fit about the Chinese control of TikTok! So at least the “American” system believes it… “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
I get exactly how people view private American companies abroad and that’s irrelevant to what I actually said.
Why are governments running all their communications and services through a private American app? Even in America, we’re not doing that, and there is always a fallback in some form of the telephone system, email, the postal service, the web or just showing up in person for anything that is absolutely essential. If I’m doing anything through a 3rd party app like WhatsApp instead, it’s either not that essential, or I’m doing it as a convenience but the fallbacks are always there.
So when people are talking about utterly essential services being run through WhatsApp and only WhatsApp, that seems like the obvious problem, because if that’s true, that’s also very stupid, and also a very stupid choice. Facebook profits from the situation, you could even say America profits from the situation, but you can’t say it isn’t without mutual engagement and compliance on the part of the supposedly aggrieved parties here.
But: people there are practical and flexible. It would take days to a month to migrate, what is impossible in first world, just take Germany as an example.
Also whatsapp is e2e encrypted, so not so bad. In Germany many things go over FAX or mail, totally unencrypted…