Some questions to WhatsApp users on GOS

Aero

I'm interested in bridging whatsapp to Element, did not know you could do this.
What are people's opinions on this, is it really worth it for privacy? (like the idea of not having the whatsapp app on my phone). My setup is just the main profile using the playstore (started years ago with Gos with privacy in mind using a thousand and one profiles and just got burnt out this way, using my current setup up now is something I'm very happy with so with this in mind would you think bridging WhatsApp is worth it for me?

Also I understand you have to have whatsapp installed on an other device and use it within 14 days (also no video calls etc), this is something I can do without issue on a old phone, but again.. I like your opinions.

brandy078

Aero AFAIK you can run WA on a VM on your desktop.
But anyway I'm also interested how practical it is to use Matrix for WA.

pingu-the-penguin

brandy078

Hey,

brandy078 I'm just curious how you use WA on your device.

I personally use it in my main profile. This comes with the downside of WA being able to see which apps I have installed in the same profile. If this is a risk that you do not want to take, feel free to put WA in it's own user profile like a Private Space (more convenient) or a secondary user profile.

brandy078 What do you do to protect yourself, when using WA or don't you care about the privacy cons?

Unfortunately, you are quite limited in what you can do privacy-wise while using WA. You have a few options that you can combine.

Use WA without Google Play Services so they can't communicate with each other. (Downside is certain functionality such as document scanning or FCM notifications will not work. WA will open its own web-socket for notifications if you choose this route and you would need to give WA unrestricted battery so notifications are timely. This comes at the cost of battery-life)
Mainly security but make sure you enable all GrapheneOS hardening toggles that do not make the app crash. You can enable: Hardened memory allocator, Secure App Spawning, Hardware Memory Tagging (can cause crashes sometimes). You can disable the app being able to use: DCL via Memory, WebView JIT and Native Code Debugging.
Restrict permissions as much as possible or opt for one-time usage permissions. WA requires the phone permission if you want to be making calls so you'd need that. Camera, Microphone and location permissions can be granted on a per-use basis. Use contact-scopes or just save contacts in-app so you aren't giving WA access to your entire contacts list. Use storage-scopes so you aren't giving WA access to all your media files.
Configure privacy and security settings in-app. There is a setting called Strict Account Security which you can enable. https://blog.whatsapp.com/whatsapps-latest-privacy-protection-strict-account-settings.
You can enable End-To-End-Encrypted backups so that your chat backups are not given to WA in an unencrypted form. (There could be more settings in-app that i'm forgetting so it would be a good idea to audit these.
You can use a VPN to hide your IP.
The least effective method is blocking DNS requests as WA can still bypass these restrictions. If you are using a VPN, you should configure DNS blocking in-app using native DNS blocking features to prevent fingerprinting from the mismatch between your VPN provider and your DNS provider.

Splendour

pingu-the-penguin This is a top-notch guide. Thanks a lot.

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