Liam Glavin ’27 (he/him) is a government major from Falls Church, Va. He loves running, reading and spending time with friends and hopes to instill values of political and civic engagement across the community. Contact him at ljglavin@wm.edu.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
GroupMe, an online messaging app, has been a ubiquitous fixture of extracurricular involvement for a fairly long time. An overwhelming majority of campus clubs and organizations use it to communicate with their members, and I can understand why it’s become so widely adopted.
The only requirement to use GroupMe is an email address. It’s free and allows for easy in-app discoverability for groups affiliated with a college campus. Furthermore, GroupMe is compatible with both iPhone and Android. It also allows organizations to put larger numbers of people into a chat than what may be feasible in a normal text messaging group.
I acknowledge all of these factors and recognize they’re likely why GroupMe is so widely used around campus. With that being said, we have to be more honest about the less fun parts that have come with our ubiquitous use of this messaging app.
First, the scam messages. Oh my God. They are so unbelievably annoying. I know everyone knows what I’m talking about because there seemingly isn’t a single GroupMe chat not plagued with this issue. The scam messages are everything from someone “giving away” their Olivia Rodgio tickets to a person “selling” their laptop or MacBook Pro. While most GroupMe owners are usually quick in removing these scammers, the messages never stop.
I feel like I’ve been inundated with dozens of these scam messages per semester across multiple chats. The scammers also don’t simply limit themselves to main chats. I’ve gotten at least a handful of direct messages across multiple semesters from scambots pretending to be women asking for sex. The problem of scammers has become so annoyingly pervasive on GroupMe and seemingly nothing has been done to seriously crack down on it.
I’m worried freshmen or other students not used to using GroupMe or seeing these messages may not understand they’re coming from scammers. I have already seen some people at the start of this semester respond to GroupMe scam messages, indicating they don’t actually understand they’re scams. I’m concerned that if we continue widely using GroupMe as we are around campus, students are going to get scammed.
GroupMe messages are also not end-to-end encrypted. This means that our messages are not protected against Microsoft, the parent company of GroupMe, accessing them and handing them off to law enforcement.
While law enforcement cooperation may not necessarily be bad on its face, I am particularly worried about what this lack of end-to-end encryption could mean for undocumented students on campus. In particular, Microsoft has a documented relationship with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to imagine a situation where ICE may be tracking a student and could get access to GroupMe chat messages to help find and detain them.
The lack of any end-to-end encryption should also concern people generally concerned about their data privacy. Even those with relatively novice hacking experience can break into something that isn’t end-to-end encrypted.
I don’t deny that accessibility should be something that we value as a community. In many ways, GroupMe does offer this to students interested in joining or belonging to campus organizations. If the accessibility GroupMe offers is something we want to continue to collectively prioritize, we should then be more mindful about acknowledging the risks to students that may come with continuing to use this messaging app.
What can we do about our current GroupMe predicament? One solution could be to continue using the message app while switching all of our main organization chats to private, so members cannot join without admin approval. Some campus groups have already done this. While it does seem to solve the problem of scam messages, it does kind of go against the whole idea of accessibility that appears to have popularized the use of GroupMe on campus in the first place. Switching GroupMe chats to private also doesn’t address the fact that the messages themselves are still not end-to-end encrypted.
I propose we explore using alternatives to GroupMe. In my opinion, the best alternative to GroupMe we all should consider would be Signal. Signal specifically addresses many of the problems with GroupMe. For one, all of its messages are end-to-end encrypted. This protects our data from being accessed or hacked by any third party and possibly being used against any students for nefarious purposes. Signal is also fairly accessible. It’s free to sign up for and only requires a phone number. Furthermore, it’s also easily compatible across iPhone and Android.
The only downside I would see to switching to Signal would be its lack of in-app discovery for groups associated with a college campus. Overall, I would consider that relatively minor when you weigh that against all of the other benefits of Signal compared to GroupMe.
Even if this opinion goes ignored and we all keep using GroupMe, I hope we can at the very least have more open discussions about the possible risks for students that could come from continuing to use this messaging app.
