German here. My last employer was visibly confused when I told him that I neither have a Whatsapp account nor a smartphone, and didn’t want either one. Apparently it was his preferred way of changing shifts last minute and he was pissed that I didn’t want to participate in that bullshit. So you want to send me a notification after effing midnight that I have to come in at 5 AM instead of 6 AM? Miss me with that shit.
Luckily I found a better job elsewhere (and they do NOT require any social media accounts - if they want to change something, they call me and ASK whether I am ok with it).
Mine used to give me a stipend and when they stopped that I told them I won’t be using my personal phone for work anymore. They never called or gave me shit over it. My old boss called me once after that but that was to go get a beer.
If you want the real answer, I had already typed him realized it could have been a woman so then did slash her. Them would have been easier if I had started that way. The way I did it I’m not sure which was easier. But it’s what I did and I’m sticking with it.
México. Everyone uses whatsapp. For personal communication or work. Businesses have their accounts you can order stuff through. Nobody uses SMS or pretty much any other chat app.
Filipino living in Singapore, married to a Japanese:
Philippines - Facebook Messenger (they love Facebook there) Singapore - WhatsApp (everyone uses it here, especially businesses, so it’s hard not to have it installed) Japan - Line (I think it’s because of the stickers and emojis?)
Lost a bunch of contacts after ditching WhatsApp a few years back but eventually managed to get most of my valuable ones to use Signal.
Work-wise everyone uses WhatsApp, for example my team has a group chat that I am not a part of, so I am losing some info on that side.
When traveling I also get a lot of prompts to use WhatsApp for example two hotels we stayed at this year did concierge only via WhatsApp.
UK here. Most people I work with will have Signal or Telegram. However my kids and the parents groups and schools all use WhatsApp.
None of them could get their friends to switch from WhatsApp. Nobody gives a shit at all about Meta and their dodgy data practices. Convenience is king. “aLL mY frIEnDs aRE oN WHatSaPp!”
They will literally be excluded if they don’t use it.
Super-frustrating and makes me feel pretty helpless tbh.
Most of my friends are in signal, but I still use WhatsApp for those who aren’t, and for my family. Never really used WhatsApp to communicate with business. (UK)
I’m in Canada. My s/o once had an employer force their staff to use WhatsApp and it was horrible, lol. The notifications were constant and the whole getting work stuff while at home was annoying. But she never had that happen before or after that one employer.
I’ve never had an employer use WhatsApp, they communicate by text if I need to be reached when I’m not working (rare for me), or email/Teams if I’m at work.
Unfortunately in most of the world it is pretty much required in many cases - I’m part of 3 work related Whatsapp groups (2 mandatory), many University groups (not mandatory technically, but much information posted there isn’t posted anywhere else), and most people I know mainly use Whatsapp as their IM platform.
Many businesses use Whatsapp for contact too these days.
US here, and yes, easily. I have WhatsApp installed on my phone but it’s probably been over a year since I used it last. SMS, email, and Facebook Messenger are the media of choice in my social circle. Work communication is over Slack and email.
But if someone wanted to use WhatsApp to talk to me, I’d use it without being bothered much.
The Netherlands and I barely use anything else to communicate with friends and family. Whatsapp is pretty much the only means of communication people use here.
Unfortunately, iMessage’s proprietary format is far more common than RCS in the US, it works better than RCS, and apple makes a lot of money using it to keep people tied to their ecosystem, so it’s unlikely anything is going to change without government action
Though I wouldn’t say Androids get it. More like Google Messages and a very few select apps get RCS. It’s a standard protocol in theory. In practice, not so much. I think there’s like 3 total apps. You’ll probably never see a FOSS RCS app, or one that isn’t tied to a big corp. Server implentations of RCS also aren’t standard, but most use Google Jibe.
USA here. No we don’t use WhatsApp at all. I communicate with all friends and family on Telegram or SMS. For work we use Slack. I refuse to have any Facebook anything installed on my phone (I don’t use social media anyway…except for Lemmy now I guess if that counts haha)
I’m a proponent of breaking social media into two categories. There should be “personal media” or something where you use your real name and information, and some other name for social media that you use an alias. The fact Reddit/Lemmy are in the same category as Facebook seems dumb. We need a better way to describe it. Depending on how you define it, news sites with comment sections could be called social media if you wanted to, but it’s clearly something different than Facebook.
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