don’t know if this is an appropriate community
I don’t particularly like this application, but my whole family uses and they simply won’t use any foss alternative I’ve proposed so far.
I’m even thinking about joining them.
I only need audio, no video calls, no file transfers.
ETA: what free droid apps can do simply that, not needing for me to provide a phone number or my current location / country?
Unfortunately you have to create an account and provide phone number to WhatsApp for communication with your family.
You can disable cloud backups, set auto destruct message timers, not use metaAI and not put any extra info, but not much else to mitigate. At least message or voice content is end to end encrypted, but Meta sure collects a lot of metadata.
Also if you are on grapheneos, you can set up contact scopes, to only include people you communicate with on the service.
you can also not givr whatsapp permission to contacts at all, with apps such as https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.theolm.wwc and https://f-droid.org/packages/com.harshalbhatia.whatsopen