Following a policy change by WhatsApp, many people are looking at alternative messaging options. The new WhatsApp policy requires people to share data with Facebook and associated companies.

WhatsApp is doing the exact thing it said it wouldn't do when it was acquired by Facebook seven years ago.

Also just by observing what they’re doing it becomes pretty clear. For example: Facebook recently purchased full-page ads on major newspapers entirely dedicated to “denounce” Apple. Why? Because Apple has built a system-level feature on iPhones that allows users to very easily disable every kind of advertising tracking and profiling. Facebook absolutely relies on being able to track you and profile your interests, so they immediately cooked up some cynical reasons why Apple shouldn’t be allowed to do this.But the truth is: if Facebook is fighting against someone on privacy matters, that someone is probably doing the right thing.

I share your frustration. This was how I felt when they split off Messenger as a separate mobile app from the main Facebook app. Messaging had been working just fine in the Facebook app, so there seemed to be no discernible reason other than pure greed. No attempt to make anything better or easier for the consumer, no innovation, nothing good for the people using the product. It was really just to inflate their download numbers and somehow make more money off of us. No thank you. I have stopped using Facebook since then.

What they say is this is due to is new EU policies about messenger apps. I'm not in the EU. I reckon it's really because there's a new Messenger desktop client for Windows 10, which does have these features. Downloading the app gives FB access to more data from your machine to sell to companies for personalized advertising purposes.

Take Facebook, for example. CEO Mark Zuckerberg will stand onstage at F8 and wax poetic about the beauty of connecting billions of people across the globe, while at the same time patenting technologies to determine users' social classes and enable discrimination in the lending process, and allowing housing advertisers to exclude racial and ethnic groups or families with women and children from their listings.