The founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg caught using Signal as an alternative to WhatsApp, the most widely used messaging app worldwide has been the center of discussions after the privacy policy change.
The recent misunderstanding with the new terms of service demonstrates the distrust of people against Facebook perfectly. The new rules include a reference to Facebook that caused all kinds of conspiracy theories to be published that the company was going to spy on WhatsApp users.
In reality, the reference to Facebook is necessary only for the service that allows contacting companies directly by WhatsApp, and the company has reiterated that messages are encrypted and cannot be read. But that has not helped much, and alternative apps such as Telegram and Signal have received many users; it seems like Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook is one of those users.
Mark Zuckerberg joins Signal
Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg himself is a Signal user, one of the messaging apps that have been growing the most in recent months. We know this thanks to the fact that Zuckerberg’s phone is one of the hundreds of millions that were leaked on the Internet last weekend.
The data of 530 million accounts are have been exposed; and in all cases, the phone number of the victims is known, although the rest of the data, such as the name or email address, may not be complete.
Mark Zuckerberg‘s account is among those affected and therefore, the phone number the billionaire used to register his account is now known to anyone curious enough to look it up. As you might imagine, that number has already been searched for everywhere; thanks to a suggestion from an Internet user on Twitter, security researcher Dave Walker decided to add the number to his Signal account to check if the CEO was registered on the competing app. And he is.
Good call. He is. pic.twitter.com/X4bn0Xh96P
— Dave W. (@Daviey) April 4, 2021
Does he use it as a WhatsApp alternative?
Like many other apps, Signal allows us to add our contacts to our friend list, and if they are not registered, we can invite them to start a conversation. But Zuckerberg’s leaked number was already registered, and moreover, with his real name; the message “Mark Zuckerberg is on Signal” appears if we try to add the number.
Does that mean that Zuckerberg doesn’t use WhatsApp to communicate, and prefers a competing app? We didn’t go so far as to say that, because it’s very likely that Zuckerberg simply wanted to see first-hand why this app is being so successful; there is no evidence that he uses this app on a daily basis.
But it’s still a funny discovery, and several jokes have already appeared on social networks. The great advantage of Signal over WhatsApp is its privacy; not only does it encrypt messages end-to-end like the Facebook app, but it has additional features such as screen protection (which prevents our messages from being captured), call redirection, or disappearing messages. But especially, it is gaining users who want nothing to do with Facebook.
