MenachemFivenbirmbaum,
“I don’t understand. Everyone talks about how social media is asur, yet tons of Frum Yidden use WhatsApp on a day to day basis.”
WhatsApp is more akin to texting than social media, though its group chats have more advanced features than SMS/MMS, and users can post a “status” (series of images) that their contacts can view and respond to. WhatsApp is a FaceBook (“Meta”) property, so if you use WhatsApp, be aware that you are interacting with FaceBook. While messages sent and received in WhatsApp are encrypted, so FaceBook cannot directly read them, they do harvest all of the metadata surrounding your messages. They can see what numbers are in your groups, which you chat with and when, and since everyone shares their contact lists with WhatsApp to see statuses, they can connect your phone number to your name many times over, as well as your contacts. And if someone you know tags you in a picture on their own FaceBook account, they also know what you look like. So even if you never touch FaceBook itself, WhatsApp reveals you to the Zuckerberg. Fun!