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Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#291

Post by eropple »

wolfgke wrote: post #232
eropple wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I, for example, consider myself as very acivist, but also very unsocial. Can you square that circle for me and explain what you're doing to be an activist while eschewing the social sphere?

> Can you square that circle for me and explain what you're doing to be an activist while eschewing the social sphere? I don't eschew the social sphere, but I strongly lack charisma/am socially rather clumsy and rather the kind of person who has difficulties forming friendships, thus I'm not very social.

OK--so how are you, as you define it, an "activist"? Activism, to my mind, requires social interaction and engagement. I'm curious as to what I'm missing.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#292

Post by Fogest »

tw04 wrote: post #279
ryandrake wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what app-of-the-week my friends use to chat with each other, but they return my E-mails and answer my phone calls. If one's friends won't communicate with them unless they're using a particular brand of messaging app, are they really friends?

Yes, they're really friends. If my friends all use whatsapp to organize parties, and I refuse to use it and force them to email me as a special one-off, am I really a friend? Because I know they'd love to have a back-and-forth conversation about timing/place/duties related to the party, then have to constantly send one-off emails to get my feedback. Let me guess - in your world they're all assholes for not constantly…

>Let me guess - in your world they're all assholes for not constantly inconveniencing themselves to cater specifically to what you want. Or you just literally have no social life,

It is probably this. It is not a hard concept to understand. I do not force my friends to use other services, and doing so would just be causing them an inconvenience and annoy them. Yes they are friends, but having to be a special butterfly doesn't mean they have to like that.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#293

Post by glasz »

Gruselbauer wrote: post #271
achou wrote: post #251

A former colleague of mine who was a distinguished academic and successful tech executive grew up in East Germany. After the Berlin wall fell, he was able to enter the building where they kept the dossiers. He found his own file and was astounded by the information they had on him. His friends, his work, his habits. Photos of himself going about his business. His social circles. His friends were equally shocked by th…

Absolutely true for older generations, but among those under, say, forty years of age, the 'I don't have anything to hide' fallacy is alive and well just as anywhere else. I'm German and it's been a huge ordeal to get my closest friends to migrate to Telegram at least. Signal was debated, but the lack of a good desktop client killed it. XMPP and IRC and all, not with these guys. Germany has some vocal proponents of p…

telegram was sort of a bad choice: https://www.eff.org/node/82654

signal desktop (granted, stupid chrome plugin but official): signal.org/desktop

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#294

Post by bogomipz »

throwawayReply wrote: post #2

How does this work, if I travel to Germany and use WhatsApp is Facebook compelled to delete all the shared data they have on me?

I would think it would be either by German carriers or else country code of the phone.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#295

Post by shopkins »

s3r3nity wrote: post #199
hiisukun wrote: post #15

Regardless of how this ends up working or being decided, I'm very happy to see such discussion occurring. The large scale collection of data on users has benefits both nominally 'good' and 'evil' - from app UX to advertising profits. But equally interesting are the potential drawbacks involving privacy concerns, and lack of user awareness. It is this last point that I find best remedied by articles like this appearin…

This is probably nitpicky, but I'm not sure I buy this idea that "advertising profits" are "evil" - last I checked I happily use a Facebook account and all its features, built by extremely hard-working and intelligent engineers, without paying a dime. Not to mention the fact that I don't want to pay, and some people just can't.

It's not the profits, but the practices that generate those profits, which people consider evil.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#296

Post by bduerst »

achou wrote: post #251

A former colleague of mine who was a distinguished academic and successful tech executive grew up in East Germany. After the Berlin wall fell, he was able to enter the building where they kept the dossiers. He found his own file and was astounded by the information they had on him. His friends, his work, his habits. Photos of himself going about his business. His social circles. His friends were equally shocked by th…

Isn't the difference here that you have the freedom to leave or not use Whatsapp if you wanted to?

Even the supposed FB shadow profiles would be hard pressed to reconstruct habit information.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#297

Post by type0 »

achou wrote: post #251

A former colleague of mine who was a distinguished academic and successful tech executive grew up in East Germany. After the Berlin wall fell, he was able to enter the building where they kept the dossiers. He found his own file and was astounded by the information they had on him. His friends, his work, his habits. Photos of himself going about his business. His social circles. His friends were equally shocked by th…

> (from the article) While WhatsApp has framed the changes as a way to give people a better service, not everyone is convinced.

Need I remind everyone how another american company called IBM helped to collect information about people in Germany and how it ended, so it's not strange that germans are "not convinced".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#298

Post by hackernews2000 »

strugglefun wrote: post #83
Mithaldu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just load it with javascript disabled. You may need to find a sane browser for that. Opera 12 does that job fine for me.

or http://textise.net . Edit: Example Result: https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=http%253A//www....

Instapaper is better for this:

https://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ndtv.com%...

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#299

Post by shopkins »

Mithaldu wrote: post #21
thecatspaw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"please turn off your adblocker" yeah, no thanks. Do you have another link?

Just load it with javascript disabled. You may need to find a sane browser for that. Opera 12 does that job fine for me.

You can easily blacklist JS on certain sites in Chrome.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany

#300

Post by hackernews2000 »

drusepth wrote: post #19
thecatspaw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"please turn off your adblocker" yeah, no thanks. Do you have another link?

In case OP doesn't, here's the article anyway: http://imgur.com/a/8MogG The ads could have been much worse.

If you use Firefox, next time press SHIFT + F2, then type in "screenshot --fullpage" and press enter.
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