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WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

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Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#41

Post by tomrod »

laurex wrote: post #20

Alert: this comment may be seen as self serving. I work on an app that has been gaining popularity precisely because it's a way to keep in touch with family and friends with no social media aspect (called Marco Polo, a video walkie talkie). I'm curious if there is going to be enough of a backlash to return to more organic face to face (and actually interactive) communication versus broadcast mode and pretending to be…

My family loves this app but I've heartily resisted due to privacy concerns. What data do you collect now, and what data do you intend to collect in the future?

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#42

Post by odammit »

Will deleting Facebook actually remove your data though?

I’ve deleted mine a few times and then inevitably have had to use OAuth for some random site I’d auth’d to and lo-and-behold it works and all my data is back. Last time I went through that flow was maybe a year ago.

I always assumed they did some sort of paranoid delete or “anonymized” the data.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#44

Post by ACow_Adonis »

iliketosleep wrote: post #31

It's quite ironic that this is the man who sold WhatsApp and its enormous userbase to facebook, creating a total lock in to the facebook ecosystem for many who do not even use facebook. He would have known what kind of a company facebook is, so I don't understand the contradiction between selling Whatsapp to them and now caring about these issues. Anyway, I am still glad he's getting behind the #deletefacebook moveme…

You really don't understand?

Let me spell it out for you:

"Money makes people do things they might not otherwise want to do if there was no money involved. Lots of money can make people do more things than little money...

Once you have a lot of money, the marginal benefit of more money becomes less, meaning the incentive trade off is lessened, and you can now spend your time talking about things further down your heirearchy of needs/value system"

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#45

Post by ggg9990 »

threeseed wrote: post #23
gnicholas wrote: post #11

If we use Twitter to announce that people should #deletefacebook, what social network do we use in the event that it becomes necessary to #deletetwitter?

It's the wrong question. Social networks are nothing more than a reflection of our society. Blaming Facebook and Twitter is easy but the hard part is dealing with the polarisation in politics, the intransingence of Russia, the inability of people to know who to trust and what is real or not and the slow disintegration of our institutions. The real question is how do you fix society ?

The same can be said about a lot of things like littering, gun violence, etc, but there’s still things you can do to treat the symptomz

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#47

Post by skybrian »

propman wrote: post #26

I don't get what changed? We've knows Facebook tracks everything, we've known Google does the same thing. If you've ever developed anything in messenger even today, it's amazing how much information is given. We know all these sites track everything you do outside of Facebook too. Everyone has been trying to get them to stop, we know it's illegal to build a profile on someone but Facebook gets around that by building…

How do you know Google does the same thing? What can you get out of Google by writing an app?

Off the top of my head, I don't think Google even has most people's friends lists (outside Orkut back in the day, and Google+, which isn't so popular). They do have contact lists in Gmail, which is a bit different.

There is address book spamming via mobile apps, but again, there are permissions. How good are they?

It seems like it's "the same thing" only if you ignore all technical detail. We should be able to do better than that!

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#48

Post by barbs »

isostatic wrote: post #16

Jan Koum Is entertaining. He was a frequent flyer and wanted to build an app that could tell people what time zone the person they are talking to was in, that they were on a flight, etc He posted on flyertalk about it and got a "meh, you have to install something? Why bother?" response 5 years later, as a frequent flyer he was into collecting miles and using them on tickets, and he had managed to get business class f…

Hahaha, I love some of the replies when he revisted the thread 4 years later:

" Isn't this one of the apps that take all your contacts from your device and upload them to a remote server? Since I have many non-contact entries in my address book (e.g. a contact card with DOB's, passport numbers, etc.), I'm reluctant to use such an app since it would indiscriminately take all this personal information and store it on a remote server.

I stick with Skype b/c basically, by logging in with a distinct login/password (as opposed to a MS ID linked to my other MS programs and accounts) and saving only limited information in Skype's address book, I'm limited the amount of data Skype would have and could take and save."

Odd to think some people used to believe Skype was more secure than WhatsApp, though to be fair, WhatsApp used to send (and store I believe) messages in plaintext.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#49

Post by walrus01 »

justboxing wrote: post #38
propman wrote: post #26

I don't get what changed? We've knows Facebook tracks everything, we've known Google does the same thing. If you've ever developed anything in messenger even today, it's amazing how much information is given. We know all these sites track everything you do outside of Facebook too. Everyone has been trying to get them to stop, we know it's illegal to build a profile on someone but Facebook gets around that by building…

> We've knows Facebook tracks everything Not disputing this, but when you say 'we' I think you mean the The rest 95% either don't know, or could care less even if they know. I've told my non-techie fam and friends about data harvesting, privacy, and how facebook tracks everything, only to be ignored or outright ridiculed ("Oh you techies are so paranoid"). Many of my friends in India (where I was raised) and elsewher…

> The rest 95% either don't know, or could care less even if they know. I've told my non-techie fam and friends about data harvesting, privacy, and how facebook tracks everything, only to be ignored or outright ridiculed ("Oh you techies are so paranoid").

pretty much exactly my experience with Canadian and American family. People didn't give one iota of a fuck when the Snowden revelations came out because they just assumed that it was the case already.

I think the average techie underestimates how important platform lockin + user interface design + ubiquity are. Once something like Facebook Messenger has reached a critical market share trying to get people to stop using it, no matter how privacy violating FB may be, is about as effective as trying to get people in the year 1985 to disconnect their house's analog telephone line.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#50

Post by 77ko »

iliketosleep wrote: post #31

It's quite ironic that this is the man who sold WhatsApp and its enormous userbase to facebook, creating a total lock in to the facebook ecosystem for many who do not even use facebook. He would have known what kind of a company facebook is, so I don't understand the contradiction between selling Whatsapp to them and now caring about these issues. Anyway, I am still glad he's getting behind the #deletefacebook moveme…

He owned 20% of Whatsapp, so its possible he didn't want to sell to FB. Only 50.1% of the shareholders presumably had to want to sell to overrule the others.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Acton

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