In my circles, there are now many non-tech friends/acquaintances who newly woke to the reality of privacy issues and are now attempting to flee WhatsApp because the bad big corp can snoop on them.

Now these are the same people who use Gmail as their primary (and often the only) e-mail provider!

Technically speaking, in the case of WhatsApp, if we should believe FB, only the metadata is leaked to the bad corp, as the content is encrypted. Bad enough. The purpose is behavioural profiling and selling advertisement.

Now, in the case of Google, you give them metadata AND the content and the purpose is the same: behavioural profiling and selling adverts.

What an irony.