WhatsApp but I touch it with a 6½ foot pole

What is the first thing that comes to mind when I say “trustworthy?”
What are the next 5 things? 10 things?

It's likely none of them were Facebook.

After Facebook got sued for using 2FA phone numbers to target ads based on cross referenced contact data last year, I pretty much solidified my decision to never interact with their products…

Until WhatsApp became the only way to stay in contact with friends I care about.

I was fine with having a simple profile set up and all permissions disabled, since the only data they would be able to access is simple device telemetry.

I did not want to share my contact data with Facebook, since I would need to get the consent of each person I know to do so in good conscience, and as we know only messages are encrypted, so WhatsApp has the full ability to share contact data with Facebook (and was previously sued for storing contact data of non-users persistently).

However, if you do not give WhatsApp access to your contacts, you can’t actually save your WhatsApp contacts outside the platform in full, only the basic details, name, and number, no profile photo or other details, moreover there isn’t a real way to actually save contact photos in the app.

So, I simultaneously want to be able to use WhatsApp without it on my device, while also being able to export contact data off the platform, without actually downloading it properly or giving it access to my contacts. If there is anything I’ve learned about, computing is similar to a soap opera in its 47th season and just about half way through the 2nd plot line. There will always be a sub-story with a quick workaround for plot progression, which informally translates to “doing things the jank way somehow works.”

Using the incredible power of “web browser” and “request desktop site” I logged into WhatsApp from my phone in a browser (little does it know it’s the same device) after first setting up my account and was then able to freely save data off the platform without any issues by simply scrapping it, which is fancy programmer speak for “tap and hold” then “download image” and “copy text” to then be properly imported into my contact book.

Now I can give people my WhatsApp number, and then proceed to text them like a normal person, being the neurodivergent and probably not often rated as normal person I am.

Small note to any WhatsApp developers reading this, you can patch the desktop site work around, but you can’t patch the good ol’ jailbreaking a phone, installing a linux KVM, and using it as a hypervisor to launch a browser with an active user agent switcher. I am actually this silly. I can be stopped only by my cat, who I worship. She likes nectarine juice. Please do not bribe her, I will have no choice but to stop finding unholy workarounds to dumb problems I create for myself because I don't want to share my data unnecessarily.

In the meantime for everyone else, thanks for reading and there’s more where this came from back on the /articles page.