Whatsapp is privacy invasive, and we likely know that even when using E2EE, this is possible due to metadata tracking.
An easy way to avoid one creepy thing, contact scanning and the creation of “who knows whom” social nets, is to not grant apps permission to your contacts!
But this is not easy, as apps often enforce this, just as they do with
- embedded cameras instead of using the system camera
- embedded galleries instead of the 2 available portals (but Google will soon forbid that)
- asking for unneeded permissions
Only GrapheneOS also allows blocking these permissions
- sensors
- internet
- loading code from memory i.e. from the internet (why would they do that? Is there something they want to hide?)
- debugging their own code to spy on the system behavior
But this app can help everyone on any Android to at least fix this :)
There’s also “Open in Whatsapp” which has been around for 5 years, I’ve used it for all this time actually, I stopped giving Whatsapp access to my contacts around the time I was degoogling, plus I keep it installed in the work profile (Shelter), where I purposefully don’t sync my personal addressbook. So this type of apps is very handy for a couple different scenarios:
All in all you save time mostly, and potentially give a little less to Meta.