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“How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

whatsapp.com

81–90 of 319 posts

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#81

This is an incredibly ugly dark pattern. The 'share information with Facebook' nugget is hidden behind a toggle at the bottom of the screen, and will be guaranteed to be missed by the 99% of users who just want to talk to their friends. Then, once you've agreed to the terms and conditions, you've got a completely arbitrary 30 days to read an online article which tells you what you've signed up for before WhatsApp is…

> WhatsApp know it and Facebook know it.

The NSA knows it too

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversations.im has made great progress in making XMPP usable on mobile devices, although its services don't seem ready for public adoption quite yet. There are very few XMPP servers which support the XEPs Conversations does so while federation is theoretically possible, it is not yet a reality. https://account.conversations.im/

Thanks. I can't really justify using a paid XMPP service, though. I was hoping for something indefinitely free. (Maybe I should look into running my own server...)

You do not need an account at conversations.im – the app works without it.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#83
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear to me why anyone would use Telegram over Signal.

Features / usability over perceived improvements to privacy / security. If you had actually used both, it would be clear why people use Telegram over Signal. Signal doesn't even have a desktop client for any OS!

> Signal doesn't even have a desktop client for any OS!

[1] https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-desktop/

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#84

Man, remember the late 90s and early 2000s, when the IM scene was a mess of incompatible networks like ICQ and AIM and MSN Messenger, and people were like "fuck this" and came up with this protocol that was interoperable with all the others through gateways and also it was extendable, and we could all be happy together?... /grump The worst part is that WhatsApp is actually based on Jabber >:(

I recently started looking into XMPP again a few days ago. I have a few ideas for projects built on top thereof. Can anybody recommend XMPP servers? I know duckduckgo has an XMPP service up and running, but I can't seem to find any relevant API documentation. All I found was this [0], which doesn't go into details about encryption settings and isn't very useful for programmatic interaction. [0] https://duck.co/blog/p…

I'm a big fan of jabber.at; it should support most modern XMPP features. Dukgo is notorious for not supporting new features and having large ammounts of downtime, I would not recommend it.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#85
post #14
post #8

Or... you know... just use something like Telegram that isn't owned by Facebook. Their data-sharing / privacy policy is pretty simple https://telegram.org/privacy 1. Sharing data We never share your data with anyone. No.

If only more people used Telegram.. I love it, but only a couple of friends use it.

Try to convince them anyways. Once they get past the grumbling of installing a new app and the entirely hypothetical inconvenience of having multiple chat apps, they'll realize that in practice it isn't really much cause for inconvenience.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#86
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a serious FUD campaign started by one of the developers of now competing app Signal a few years ago. Now if you mention Telegram on Reddit you're immediately bombed with "OMG TELEGRAM CRYPTO IS BROKEN!" even though 0 people on earth have ever provably decrypted a Telegram message. They even offered a $300K bounty where you could act as the server... no takers.

Does Telegram use E2E encryption by default now, yes or no?

Probably not, but the hilarious thing is that a year or so after attacking Telegram for that, the developers of Signal took a substantial chunk of cash from Google to promote Allo as using Signal Protocol and end to end encryption, even though it's disabled by default so Google can mine your chat history for ad targeting (and enabling it has the inconvenient side effect of disabling your own local chat history).

Basically, it's about the cash. Signal's business model is to convince everyone that their protocol is the only secure one and charge everyone to licence it. If that means promoting non-E2E services that store and mine chat history, that's fine so long as they pay up.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#87

Man, remember the late 90s and early 2000s, when the IM scene was a mess of incompatible networks like ICQ and AIM and MSN Messenger, and people were like "fuck this" and came up with this protocol that was interoperable with all the others through gateways and also it was extendable, and we could all be happy together?... /grump The worst part is that WhatsApp is actually based on Jabber >:(

And yes, I absolutely realize that the protocol had flaws, was overly verbose, the base spec required a continuous connection which is hard/impossible on mobile networks, its extensibility meant that clients could end up with little common compatibility, etc etc... But still.

A continuous connection is actually desirable on mobile networks to save battery; your phone can turn the radio on to a power saving mode if you use a single TCP connection and no traffic is being sent and only wake it up again when it gets a paging message alerting it that there is new data to be sent down over the TCP connection. However, if you use something that requires multiple connections (eg. to poll and see if new data is available), you will have to put the radio into full power mode every time you poll to check if there's new data.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#88
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yes, I absolutely realize that the protocol had flaws, was overly verbose, the base spec required a continuous connection which is hard/impossible on mobile networks, its extensibility meant that clients could end up with little common compatibility, etc etc... But still.

The protocol is an absolute nightmare to work with, even when you're only using it for your own internal systems and so control everything that's involved. I heard that WhatsApp stopped using it long ago, and if so, that wouldn't surprise me.

This is untrue; WhatsApp still uses a profile of XMPP with a custom compression layer.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#89

My problem with whatsapp is that there's no way to use it without giving access to my entire contact list to the app. And that's out of the question for me.

On iOS you can actually deny access when the OS prompt comes up and WhatsApp will still work. You just have to start conversations using a phone number instead of a name/contact. I use it this way, and it is a little inconvenient but I feel better not uploading my phone book.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#90

Man, remember the late 90s and early 2000s, when the IM scene was a mess of incompatible networks like ICQ and AIM and MSN Messenger, and people were like "fuck this" and came up with this protocol that was interoperable with all the others through gateways and also it was extendable, and we could all be happy together?... /grump The worst part is that WhatsApp is actually based on Jabber >:(

> The worst part is that WhatsApp is actually based on Jabber

I'm missing something here; why is this a bad thing?

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