There are safe, privacy-minded user-friendly alternatives around such as Signal or Session so why do people persist with WhatsApp? Partly it's because as the article states, WhatsApp users are 'unfazed by the news', tweeting that it was no surprise that a large tech company owned by Facebook would monitor user messages. See? Noone cares. Anyone who is security or privacy-conscious would have got off WhatsApp years ago. One user wrote, 'I thought we all knew what Facebook was doing?'. So that's all right then...
'WhatsApp's promise of private messages with end-to-end encryption appears to have been...' a big fat lie. (alternative link https://archive.is/G9DIt
'When Facebook purchased the popular messaging app for $19 billion in 2014, both companies assured users that their data could not be accessed by either company.
'But Facebook not only hired 1,000 workers to sift through millions of messages on WhatsApp, which has two billion users around the world, but it also shared some of those messages with law enforcement and the U.S. Department of Justice to help put people in prison, ProPublica claims...'