What's app CEO quoted : "We don’t know your birthday. We don’t know your home address, none of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp, and we really have no plans to change that."

As today announces a breaking change with the automatic sharing of your private data with Facebook, thereby destroying the confidence you might have had in it, perhaps it is a good time to think about another quote from the same CEO : "Our values and our respect for your privacy continue to guide the decisions we make at WhatsApp, It’s why we’ve rolled out end-to-end encryption, which means no one can read your messages other than the people you talk to. Not us, not Facebook, nor anyone else."

There you have it.

Personally I have no facebook account and no whats app account. I could not care less about the privacy breach except that this makes whatsapp not a unique service that protects your privacy while all others don't, it makes whatsapp operate in the same league than all those privacy thieves.

You can't have faith in a commercially run business (remember that whatsapp got 22 billion dollars from facebook). What I don't understand though is, with so many open source developers searching foran exciting project to work on, why don't they work on an open source whatsapp clone that is so easy to deploy for normal users that we end up with many groups of people who know each other set up and run such a server on their own on top of a regular hosting package. Those users would remain in total control of the communication service in question.