Is text messaging (SMS, not RCS) or WhatsApp messaging more secure?

If someone doesn't have a more secure app like Signal, is WhatsApp or regular text messaging more private? I'm comparing these two because almost everyone I know uses them. To my understanding WhatsApp uses E2E encryption so no one else can read the messages, but doesn't Meta still collect lots of 'meta' information? For example, does WhatsApp do something like report to Meta statistics of messages like the most repeated word out of each message sent? I know SMS are …

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