Comment by jwr

In Central Europe (Poland), too.

Nobody, and I do mean nobody, realizes that using Whatsapp by default (which everyone accepts) synchronizes their entire contacts list to Meta. It's a golden trove of valuable data for an ad targeting company.

People don't realize that there is so much that can be inferred about you from your contacts. Whether you have kids, which schools they go to, and similar personal information.

All of this is not even on the radar and people reduce privacy to "whether someone listens in on my calls or conversations" and tend to brush it off, because they honestly don't care about that part.

Signal doesn't make it easier by refusing to allow encrypted iCloud backups for so many years (which means people lose data when they lose their phones!) and recently introducing a subscription backup service instead of allowing me to do an encrypted iCloud backup. It's hard to explain to people that they should use an inferior product just because of "privacy".