You can deactivate anyone's WhatsApp account by simply sending an email
Isn't this flow what more ore less what you would expect? Could someone suggest what would be the appropriate alternative here?- The inconvenience to the deactivated account is minor: one SMS verification code and the account is back, queued messages get received, etc.- Persons who lost their phones probably don't have a good fast way of proving their identity, as their identity is tied to their phone number in WhatsApp's model.- Needing to quickly lock out spammers, thiefs or hackers is probably far more frequent than abuse of this feature.- If abuse of this feature becomes a recurring problem, I'd expect WhatsApp to react and adjust the flow to place more burden on its user.The auto-delete part is slightly more worrying, but if you don't use WhatsApp during 30 days, your account and group membership probably isn't very precious. Backups are automated and separate. You can still easily re-create an account with the same number then.The story might be "Apps should stop using SMS and phones numbers as the source of identity", and while I generally agree, most comments don't seem to be about this and WhatsApp is maybe _the_ one app whose success was based on this very idea.