Will you invite Mark Zuckerberg to your wedding?

TLDR; this is just a critique on the default non-private design of Whatsapp, a famous messaging app. Many apps adopt this design principle. We have to be critical of such design and the people behind those designs.

You own a sim belonging to a particular network. The sim is capable of storing a few mobile numbers. However, these days people have their contacts synced up in Google. Having google contacts makes it easy to restore contacts onto a new phone. This is relatively convenient for many consumers.

Most people in India prefer using a single mobile sim for all purposes. Culturally this dates back to the days when people had landline telephones. Each house would probably have only one phone line and a single phone number. It was enough; it served its purpose. For our various domestic needs at the time, we'd often call an electrician, plumber, etc. Back in those days we stored their numbers in a diary. The wired telephones of that time did not have a capability to store phone numbers on it.

Cut to the modern day, traditional SIMs have an upper limit as to how much numbers they can store. These limits are far superseded by what can be stored on Google Contacts. 

Now whatsapp is a modern messaging app which the company called as Meta, formerly Facebook, has acquired a long while back. A long while back it has introduced the system of showing a status. 

A WhatsApp Status is a feature in WhatsApp that lets you share updates with your contacts in a certain format. Primarily the section below will outline it

📌 Key Details of WhatsApp Status

• Temporary posts: A status update lasts for 24 hours before disappearing automatically.
• Content types: You can post text, photos, videos, GIFs, or links.
• Privacy controls: You decide who can see your status (all contacts, selected contacts, or exclude specific ones).
• End-to-end encryption: Like chats, statuses are protected so only the people you choose can view them.
• Replies: Friends can reply directly to your status, which starts a private chat.

🎯 Purpose

• Share moments (like a trip photo or a thought of the day).
• Broadcast announcements (e.g., “Closed today” for a business).
• Express moods or creativity with text, emojis, and stickers.

⚡ Example

• You post: “Enjoying the sunset 🌅” with a photo.
• Your contacts see it in the Status tab.
• After 24 hours, it disappears automatically.

So, a WhatsApp Status is essentially your short-lived story or update that your contacts can view for a day.

It is a given that Whatsapp has privacy controls which enable controlling who you are going to share your update with. But people do not realize that out-of-the-box, your status updates go to everyone in your contacts who also use whatsapp.

Why would you want to share your "personal" status update with your plumber/electrician/taxi driver/etc? These are people not directly connected with most aspects of your life. Would you invite these people to your wedding, or, your children's wedding? Perhaps there are a few people who might invite such people to their marriages or important life events. But statistically speaking they don't make the majority of people in urban India. (In Indian villages, the story is a little different). 

What do we do about it? Are we not meant to store contacts of local service providers in our phone contacts? Are they meant to be only reached via internet search? Are we supposed to have a different mobile number and phone only meant to store the number of local service providers?

What does it say about the company or the person who has designed such an app? Does he care about your privacy? Will you invite such a person to your family wedding? The creators or owners of such apps are considered celebrities. There is a certain social allure to invite a celebrity to your personal life event. It might give you a relative social flair if you get to mention that a celebrity is attending your marriage. To me, personally that idea is insane. If you are likely to show such a behavior, then you might surely will get labelled as a status-seeking social and selfish animal with no concern to protect the society you live in.

On a relative positive vein of thought, perhaps one could argue that "that design" is actually meant to make you "more" privacy conscious. It is what is required by the ever-changing modern times. I don't agree. Perhaps life might go this route...One day our future generations should be thought in schools itself to be privacy conscious. But the kind of privacy issues in the modern day were much different a few centuries back. Case-in-point - you should probably read the classic by T.H called "The Mayor of Casterbridge". We were not bothered by privacy those days. Why should we now?