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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?”

#241
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don't use these tools if you value privacy" is not that far off from "If you have nothing to hide, why are you afraid of surveillance?" An observed life is not a free life. Many people have to use social media to communicate with family, work associates, etc... In many cases, facebook messaging has replaced methods of communication that did not rely on the content or metadata of messages for profit. All that really…

Is email not sufficient to communicate with family, work associates, etc.?

slack and facebook exist because many people view email as insufficient

also, it's email. yes, it's highly insufficient

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

#242
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is email not sufficient to communicate with family, work associates, etc.?

I've thought about building something that gives a social network type experience that is built on top of email. Any status update would get sent out to an email list of your connections, and all the emails could be put in a specific mail folder using standard rules. A front end app would then scan that folder and give you a personalized page that represents the latest status based on what it sees in that folder. The…

I recall (but can't find) having seen a social network built on Keybase.io's encrypted filesystem (KBFS), where your public data is signed stored in your public folder, and your private data is encrypted and shared with only those you choose. Everything is based on files.

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

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of Signal (Moxie Marlinspike) seems actively hostile to not only federation efforts but also compatibility with other clients, even one that only removed the dependency of Signal on Google Play Services: http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/posts/signal-lock-in.ht...

Even worse, he tries to deny people their legal right to build their own clients to services they have the right to use. Which is a legal right in the EU (and even allows you to reverse engineer proprietary code for the purpose of writing your own system that interoperates with a proprietary one), so this is very sketchy. Moxie seems like a Google-employee.

He doesn't. You just can't use custom clients with his server.

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

#244
post #68

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…

Most don't like hearing this: if you don't want your personal information to be shared, don't use these "social media" tools. I suspect that you'd be familiar with LinkedIn dark patterns [0] too. [0] https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae...

I just found another one (while trying my 'free trial' of LinkedIn Premium):

* You have to enter a credit card number to begin the 'free trial', for a 'seamless experience' (ie. so we can bill you if you forget to cancel).

* You have to cancel your free trial 1 day or more before the end of the trial period to avoid being billed for the next month (at least I hope it's "1 day or more" and not "exactly 1 day"... the exact wording is "If you wish to avoid being charged for your free trial, you must cancel the trial one day prior to the auto-renewal.")

* You can't then delete your payment method at the same time, and must remember to do so after the end of the billing cycle.

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

#245
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Signal doesn't even have a desktop client for any OS! [1] https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-desktop/

> Signal Desktop is a Chrome app So yeah, the statement from parent still stands.

So this argument is just a technicality. Please understand a little more about the background:

There is basically one person writing the app[1], and given the company has just a few[2] people _volunteering_[3] for them, you cannot expect them to release a large amount of code across so many devices. They prioritized the highest volume first.

Open Whisper Systems primarily develops a strong encryption protocol (Moxie's efforts). If you didn't realize, this protocol was adopted by WhatsApp[4] and also Facebook Messenger[5]. So, the developers of those other applications needn't spend time/resources on the encryption, but can release Desktop clients for people like yourself to enjoy.

People who use Signal trust Moxie. People who dislike Signal _may_ care more about features than the security properties of the software (note, WhatsApp doesn't open-source their software[6], and Telegram instead bets people cannot break their encryption[7]).

Also, their app will supposedly run on any OS that Chrome runs. I'm sure that was the intention.

[1] https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop/commits/mas...

[2] https://whispersystems.org/#team

[3] https://whispersystems.org/workworkwork/

[4] https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp-Security-Whitepap...

[5] https://whispersystems.org/blog/facebook-messenger/

[6] https://www.whatsapp.com/opensource/

[7] https://telegram.org/blog/cryptocontest

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ah, okay. I misunderstood. Cool!

Yep. In addition to that, it’s also FOSS¹ and you aren’t limited to only getting it from the Google Play Store; it’s also distributed² on F-Droid³ too. One thing to note though is that the version of Conversations on F-Droid doesn’t support push notifications, since that functionality uses Google Cloud Notifications.

――――――

¹ — https://github.com/siacs/Conversations

² — https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=eu.siacs.convers...

³ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-Droid

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

#247
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who finances Telegram? Who pays for the serves?

> Pavel Durov, who shares our vision, supplied Telegram with a generous donation through his Digital Fortress fund, so we have quite enough money for the time being. If Telegram runs out, we'll invite our users to donate and add non-essential paid options to break even. But making profits will never be a goal for Telegram. - https://telegram.org/faq#q-how-are-you-going-to-make-money-o...

Who funds their "crack our encryption" contest[1]? I imagine also the same pot?

[1] https://telegram.org/blog/cryptocontest

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

#248
post #173

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…

When you will try to actualy delete your fb account (at least when i did it some time ago). Its a minefield of dark patterns. First you need special link, because you can only deactivate from settings. Then you will have to go through pile of emotionaly draining photos of friends with claims that they will mis you and you wont be able to see what they are doing with their lives. Then few traps with agreeing about del…

Depends on the jurisdiction. In the EU (maybe only Germany?) you can legally request all information Facebook has on you, as well as request that all information is removed (as long as it's no longer needed for billing purposes, etc.).

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

#250
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of XMPP is interoperability, so saying some proprietary service uses it internally is useless for the rest of the world without interoperability. Can you connect with third party clients? Can they federate? Are they contributing to the protocol? No. So what's good about it?

Big proprietary users of protocols tend to discover bugs in them, that they feed upstream, even if they run otherwise closed networks. E.g. it benefits you that Google uses TCP internally, even if you can't get on their network? Why? Because they've submitted patches to Linux to make it work better.

> E.g. it benefits you that Google uses TCP internally

But they didn't modify TCP to prevent interoperability did they?

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