I like Whatsapp, and this change seems in line with what Whatsapp always has been. Of course I'm always wary of advancements, ready to uninstall it if really bad news arrive, but in general Whatsapp has been respectful of its users, especially those that are privacy concerned.

They hired a lead developer from Signal to implement E2E encryption, its functionality is almost completely transperent, which reduces the need to inspect source code to understand functionality. The most severe of privacy criticisms have amounted to "Facebook knows who you message and at what times you message", which is a very good position for a 2B user platform to be in, since it doesn't read message contents.

I have tried Signal, but I cannot recommend it to family (yet), since I don't find what they do with metadata harmful, it's just a price to pay for the otherwise free app, like advertisement. Anyone who has recommended Signal so far sounded like an inflexible Stallman fundamentalist. I reserve my voice for other more serious incidents, if there is a successful warrant for message contents or if there is ad targetting based on message contents, then I will start sounding the horns, but for now: Meh.