WhatsApp’s nightmare week has continued to get worse—a backlash against the scale of its data collection quickly followed by its sudden forcing of new terms of service on its users to share their data with Facebook.

In reality, WhatsApp has had this Facebook issue ever since the social media giant acquired the messaging app back in 2014?

WhatsApp, which was arguably hit harder, complained that its data collection was misrepresented, and that Apple’s own iMessage was not subject to the same scrutiny, which was unfair.

WhatsApp continued to defend its data privacy—attesting that little was shared with Facebook, that the labelling overlooked its security measures, that all the data was needed to operate a platform serving 2 billion users and 100 billion daily messages.

“Has Facebook finally broken WhatsApp,” I asked back then, when it was already clear that this risk “radical” change to WhatsApp was in train.

This isn’t about WhatsApp sharing any more of your general data with Facebook than it does already, this is about using your data and your engagement with its platform to enable shopping and other business services, to provide a platform where businesses can communicate with you and sell to you, all for a price they will pay to WhatsApp.

WhatsApp does not share data for its European users with Facebook for the enhancement of its products and services—that hasn’t changed.

“As we announced in October,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told me, “WhatsApp wants to make it easier for people to both make a purchase and get help from a business directly on WhatsApp.” But the combination of the words Facebook and data is a red rag to the media, and the backlash has quickly intensified.

I’ve long advocated for Signal, which has managed to combine the usability of WhatsApp without the same holes in its security and data practices.

Signal’s marketing doesn’t need to go much further than we’re not Facebook, in reality, WhatsApp has actually been doing the marketing for its rival these past few days. WhatsApp even uses Signal’s own protocol for its encryption, albeit it has a proprietary version of this which is not open-source, unlike Signal itself which shares everything to enable the open-source community to find and report bugs and vulnerabilities.

WhatsApp’s data sharing hasn’t really changed, its security hasn’t changed, it remains the largest end-to-end encrypted platform available, and one that’s likely be used by all those you communicate with.

WhatsApp is materially better than SMS and Facebook Messenger, its mainstream alternatives, it is secure cross-platform unlike iMessage, and it’s end-to-end encrypted by default, unlike Telegram. .

WhatsApp should have accepted that its data collection is out of step with other secure messengers and changed its practices.

For a time at least this week, Signal found itself going head to head for installs with Facebook, beating Messenger and with just WhatsApp to catch.

But, the reality is that WhatsApp can afford to lose millions of concerned users as a trade-off to its commercial plans, knowing that it will retain the vast, indifferent majority.

“I get the ire of people that hate that WhatsApp being a Facebook asset is now being brought seemingly under its rod of monetization through data sharing and targeted advertising,” says cybersecurity analyst Mike Thompson.

No one asks them and so they will continue to use WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and life will go on.

Second, there is a longer-term aspiration on Facebook’s part to fully integrate the backends of WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram—and while there are questions around WhatsApp’s data, the privacy labels for the other two are shockingly bad