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

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

#121

Post by SamWhited »

niftich wrote: post #92
SamWhited wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The worst part is that WhatsApp is actually based on Jabber I'm missing something here; why is this a bad thing?

It's ironic; that albeit they started with an open federation protocol they don't federate and are essentially a proprietary service.

XMPP isn't an "open federation protocol" it's just a protocol that includes a means to federate; doing so is a matter of server preference. It would be great if more large services federated, but I'd rather have them use XMPP and not federate than build more custom protocols and not use XMPP at all so that I can't write a third party client for them.

My point is that being based on XMPP is still a good thing, regardless of whether they federate or not.

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

#122

Post by DavideNL »

nicolas_t wrote: post #21

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.

as a workaround, on an iPhone you could move your 'sensitive' contacts to another app, like "Contactshield".

then you can safely share your 'normal' contacts with Whatsapp.

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

#123

Post by newscracker »

amaks wrote: post #52

Simple, just don't use WhatsApp.

I'm not sure how much help this would be, but also make sure to delete your WhatsApp account before you stop using it (instead of just deleting the app and abandoning the account).

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

#124

Post by gonehome »

newscracker wrote: post #114
gonehome wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Telegram is way ahead on several fronts - UX, feature rollout speed, message delivery speed, multi-platform support, multi-device message sync, etc. Signal is still improving slowly and is nowhere close to Telegram (in my experience) in any of these areas. Of the three apps I use for messaging, my current position is that Telegram > Wire > Signal.

Thanks for explanation - sounds like it's generally a tradeoff of UX vs. Security, didn't know things were that much better in the Telegram world.

Seems to me though that if you're willing to use telegram you might as well just use iMessage or What's App though?

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

#125

Post by saint_fiasco »

iklos89 wrote: post #79
zaidf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, Telegram's small user base is actually what got me on it. My whatsapp is full of way too many groups that I can't leave without negative social consequences. So the one group that I cared about the most (a group with my siblings), we all decided to move to Telegram and haven't looked back since! It's awesome to just have the few closest people on an app and not having to fear that you'll accidentally send a m…

Regarding negative social consequences ... Today I switched phones and wanted to transfer my Whatsapp contacts to the new phone. What Whatsapp did: Somehow they managed to delete me from each and every group I had been in, deleted every chat and I cannot access this anymore. I already had to explain to three friends why I left our group as they were furious because we had talked about important things in those groups…

> deleted every chat

Whatsapp never stores the chat history anywhere. All conversations are encrypted end to end.

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

#127

Post by throwanem »

MrZongle2 wrote: post #115
throwanem wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And watch your friendships grow stale, lose touch with your family members, opt out of knowing about upcoming events... The phrase "network effect" exists for a reason. Where people don't think about keeping in touch with others in any terms other than Facebook, refusing to play along with Facebook comes with serious consequences.

"And watch your friendships grow stale, lose touch with your family members, opt out of knowing about upcoming events..." And how exactly do you think these things worked before Facebook? "Friends" who don't want to make the effort to stay in touch outside of a dead-simple social app aren't friends, anyway.

I mean, yeah, that's easy to say and all, and it makes you feel special and everything. It's also horseshit.

The problem is not that your friends don't care enough about you to keep in touch by means other than Facebook. The problem is that Facebook has so completely insinuated itself into and throughout a billion people's interpersonal relationships that your friends don't even think about keeping in touch by means other than Facebook.

Put another way, we find ourselves in a situation where a single, rather secretive corporation mediates the interactions of a significant fraction of the species, and has already been known to manipulate the perception of its users in ways which might be to its benefit. When I was a kid, this would've been no more than fodder for third-rate dystopian sf which even fans of the genre mostly wouldn't take seriously. And yet, somehow, here we are.

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

#128

Post by newscracker »

gonehome wrote: post #124
newscracker wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram is way ahead on several fronts - UX, feature rollout speed, message delivery speed, multi-platform support, multi-device message sync, etc. Signal is still improving slowly and is nowhere close to Telegram (in my experience) in any of these areas. Of the three apps I use for messaging, my current position is that Telegram > Wire > Signal.

Thanks for explanation - sounds like it's generally a tradeoff of UX vs. Security, didn't know things were that much better in the Telegram world. Seems to me though that if you're willing to use telegram you might as well just use iMessage or What's App though?

> sounds like it's generally a tradeoff of UX vs. Security

Not necessarily. Wire has shown that a Telegram like UX is possible with end-to-end encryption, multi-device sync and multi-platform support. It's just that Wire and Signal are slow in catching up and seem like they need a slightly larger team and/or better management of the development.

> didn't know things were that much better in the Telegram world.

I keep trying any new messaging platform like this, especially if it promises privacy and better security. So I'd recommend you try Telegram and see for yourself what it provides. I'm heavily impressed by what it offers and use it as my primary messaging client, but don't like the crypto and the fact that normal chats are not end-to-end encrypted.

> Seems to me though that if you're willing to use telegram you might as well just use iMessage or What's App though?

That depends on which company one is more comfortable with on the privacy front. I don't consider iMessage to be equivalent to Telegram in features or UX (it's actually inferior and has issues with handling SMS as a backup option). WhatsApp being connected to Facebook is a no-no from the privacy point of view.

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

#129

Post by milcron »

skrowl wrote: 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.

I notice nobody in this thread has yet mentioned the FOSS (Apache license), cross-platform, encrypted messenger ChatSecure https://chatsecure.org/

The Guardian Project writes a bunch of nice software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian_Project_(software...

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

#130

Post by Joeboy »

mercer wrote: post #85
gyosko wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having to look in half a dozen apps to track down information is not a hypothetical inconvenience.
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