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WhatsApp – Opting out of new terms doesn’t stop Facebook taking information

independent.co.uk

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Re: WhatsApp – Opting out of new terms doesn’t stop Facebook taking information

#81

Post by anon1385 »

patrickaljord wrote: post #66
dingaling wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't trust them why don't you just stop using them? OK, so then your phone number is still being shared with Facebook through people who use WhatsApp and have you in their contact list. How do you opt out of that? There are some Internet 'outrages' that are just sound and fury, but this one has merit. A company that gained access to one of people's most private networks, their contact list, on a guarantee o…

> on a guarantee of privacy that has been unilaterally revoked The Whatsapp ToS also says that they can change the ToS anytime they want and however they want and people using their software knew this. This is the risk that exists with every single proprietary platform. If you don't own the code, eventually it is going to screw you, Stallman has been saying so for 40 years now and people still get surprised when it h…

Saying users shouldn't trust the Cloud is absolutely correct. That's not what you said to start with though. You said "I don't get the problem". The problem is that people are getting, in your words, "screwed" by unilateral changes to ToS and privacy agreements because they have been duped into trusting cloud services. The vast majority of WhatsApp users have never heard of Richard Stallman, never mind read his essays on cloud computing.

This isn't just about WhatsApp. Just about every Cloud service ToS ever written contains the provision to "change the ToS anytime they want and however they want ". People have a (probably ill-founded) expectation that those changes will be fairly reasonable. By pushing things to the legal limit (and beyond) WhatsApp is poisoning the well for everybody else.

You have to appreciate that if users no longer have any trust in the cloud then half the readers of this site are going to be out of a job. You think all the people who attend your React.js conferences are working on open source projects that the users install on hardware that they control? I very much doubt it.

If you think Stallman is right then surely you should be spreading this example of his correctness to as many people as possible so that they find out about it. But the impression I get from your posts is that you'd rather people weren't talking about it at all.

Personally I hope that more Cloud services blatantly piss off their users in this way, because I want the entire idea of cloud services to be discredited. And yes that means that I'm hoping Patrick Aljord doesn't have cloud startup devs paying to attend his javascript conferences anymore.

Re: WhatsApp – Opting out of new terms doesn’t stop Facebook taking information

#82

Post by bad_user »

enraged_camel wrote: post #64
bad_user wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you seen another search engine make a dent in Google's market share? Google has been doing a good job in maintaining the technical superiority of their search engine and haven't provided a serious incentive for people to switch, even though they came close with their whole Google+ clusterfuck. That said, Bing and DuckDuckGo did make a dent in Google's market share, it's not much, but it's significant enough th…

>>That said, Bing and DuckDuckGo did make a dent in Google's market share, it's not much, but it's significant enough that they'll still exist for some time. DuckDuckGo still doesn't appear as more than a blip on most market share charts. As for Bing, the only reason it made a dent on Google is because Microsoft leveraged its own monopoly position on Windows to default searches to Bing. After that, it just had to be…

I have been critical of DuckDuckGo in the past, but it's the only one that promises privacy as a core feature. And if you couple it with a TOR browser or some anonymous proxy, you can hope for some privacy when doing sensitive searches.

A service like this doesn't need to be super popular. If it carves out an important niche, such as privacy aware users, then it can stay in the business and be a solid alternative for a long time. And they'll grow in market share too, they just need to stay afloat for long enough.

Re: WhatsApp – Opting out of new terms doesn’t stop Facebook taking information

#83

Post by hahooooo »

Sylos wrote: post #29
nly wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did we really expect? That they were going to support a 1 billion user app as a public good? The writing was on the wall when they dropped the 79 pence per year fee

I did expect it, but I'd still rather pay with money.

Or pay with both, like the NYT (print edition) which costs money _and_ comes with ads, Windows 10 (assuredly not free, the OEM has to pay for it)

Re: WhatsApp – Opting out of new terms doesn’t stop Facebook taking information

#84

Post by sirkneeland »

stephenr wrote: post #78
themartorana wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your anecdotal experience does not change the reality of the audience that uses social networking and messaging and the dominant players in those markets. If you decided you wanted to join in your choices would be limited, and these two services dominate their respective markets.

The ability to have friends and a family without the use of Facebook and WhatsApp is "anecdotal evidence"? Are you fucking kidding me?

well, in terms of anecdotal evidence, I live and work abroad and tools like Facebook and WhatsApp make it possible to communicate with my friends and family back home at a cost of next to nothing.

A decade ago, international phone calls and SMS would have cost me an arm and a leg, and there's really no equivalent for Facebook which lets me keep in touch with the lives of people I care about on the other side of the world.

Yes, there was email but that doesn't really substitute for the short low-latency, ubiquitous worldwide communication of WhatsApp (and it certainly didn't 10 years ago when it was largely tethered to a desk) nor the ability to keep up with my friends unsolicited that is Facebook (what am I supposed to do, ask all of my friends to write me an email of what they're doing once a week?)

Are global migrant workers an edge case? perhaps. But while forfeiting FB and WhatsApp wouldn't make me a hermit, it would certainly make communications with my friends and family back home to be lesser in number and richness.

Re: WhatsApp – Opting out of new terms doesn’t stop Facebook taking information

#85

Post by beagle3 »

bad_user wrote: post #60
proactivesvcs wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goodness gracious, I hadn't realised adverts had gotten that bad again. You'd think with the ever-increasing backlash against web site advertisement they'd balk at such behaviour on their web site.

In the past I was against ad-blockers, thinking that websites need a business model to survive and that subscriptions can't work for everyone. But this has turned into a serious assault on privacy. So nowadays I have uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, the "Tracking Protection" in Firefox enabled by default and I'm seriously considering NoScript, too bad it wasn't available for Firefox Android last time I checked.

What do privacy badger and tracking protection provide that uBlock Origin doesn't?

Re: WhatsApp – Opting out of new terms doesn’t stop Facebook taking information

#86

Post by stephenr »

sirkneeland wrote: post #84
stephenr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ability to have friends and a family without the use of Facebook and WhatsApp is "anecdotal evidence"? Are you fucking kidding me?

well, in terms of anecdotal evidence, I live and work abroad and tools like Facebook and WhatsApp make it possible to communicate with my friends and family back home at a cost of next to nothing. A decade ago, international phone calls and SMS would have cost me an arm and a leg, and there's really no equivalent for Facebook which lets me keep in touch with the lives of people I care about on the other side of the w…

I moved away from the state I grew up in at age 23. 10 years and 3 states and a different country later, I still keep in touch with the people who are actual friends.

I didn't say you shouldn't or can't use Facebook. I said it's ridiculous to equate a lack of Facebook with a hermit lifestyle, even for geographically distant people.

There are literally dozens of ways to keep in contact using Internet based communication channels. If you choose to use those that are controlled by a privacy whoring twat of a company, that's your business.

Re: WhatsApp – Opting out of new terms doesn’t stop Facebook taking information

#87

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

madeofpalk wrote: post #27

Sidetone, but I find it a bit rich that The Independent is going all high and mighty about privacy and sharing data, when they have the most atrocious ad and tracking experience I've seen on a media site in a long time. Ghostly found 40 trackers http://imgur.com/a/miilB , the ads are extremely obnoxious. There's literally ads on top of ads sliding down my screen, pushing the content around. https://gfycat.com/Insecur…

As if the journalists agree with the ad trackers ;)

Re: WhatsApp – Opting out of new terms doesn’t stop Facebook taking information

#88

Post by jlarocco »

bikamonki wrote: post #47

It's too late! Have you seen another search engine make a dent in Google's market share? How about another OS challenging Windows on a PC? Another social network? It is rather obvious that: if the main purpose of a business is to grow revenue/market share, if successful, it will eventually grow to close to 100% market share. This situation, commonly known as a monopoly, cannot be reversed by free market competition a…

> It's too late! Have you seen another search engine make a dent in Google's market share? How about another OS challenging Windows on a PC? Another social network?

I don't see what your point is with regards to search engines and operating systems. There are a ton of search engines (Bing, DDG, Gigablast, ...) and a ton of operating systems (Linux, OSX, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, etc). You're complaining that Microsoft and Google are dominating their markets and being abusive, but also complaining the alternatives aren't dominating the market and being abusive?

And in the grand scheme of things, social networking sites are not very important. There's a million other ways to communicate with people that don't involve Facebook, so use one of them.

Re: WhatsApp – Opting out of new terms doesn’t stop Facebook taking information

#89

Post by what_ever »

goombastic wrote: post #37

Facebook swiped whatsapp data a year or two ago. I've never ever installed FB on my mobile and yet it suggests whatsapp contacts as friends. It's just such a brazen move that everyone assumes it is legal.

Not saying that's not possible but it's a two way connection. May be your connections installed Facebook on their phone and FB contact permission and they got your name from there. Your phone number didn't come into picture.

Re: WhatsApp – Opting out of new terms doesn’t stop Facebook taking information

#90

Post by jgalt212 »

bikamonki wrote: post #47

It's too late! Have you seen another search engine make a dent in Google's market share? How about another OS challenging Windows on a PC? Another social network? It is rather obvious that: if the main purpose of a business is to grow revenue/market share, if successful, it will eventually grow to close to 100% market share. This situation, commonly known as a monopoly, cannot be reversed by free market competition a…

It's definitely not too late to switch away from WhatsApp. These chat apps seems to have relatively short lifetimes. ICQ, AOL IM, and Yahoo IM (at one time or another these were all dominant).

Of course, whoever comes next to dominate chat may or may not have more customer friendly privacy/data sharing than FB/WhatsApp.

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