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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

#381

Post by pteredactyl »

77ko wrote: post #136

Brian Acton's post[0] about the Signal Foundation[1] makes it sound like they could play in the same space as Facebook: > Of course, this is just the beginning. There is a lot of work to be done to make our dream a reality and we will continually be asking our peers, our community, and ourselves if there are more effective ways to serve the public good. In the immediate future we are focused on adding to our talented…

Facebook has been using Signal Foundation's protocol in Whatsapp since last April

https://www.fastcompany.com/3067468/why-open-whisper-systems...

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#382

Post by mmsimanga »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #342
walrus01 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Once something like Facebook Messenger has reached a critical market share trying to get people to stop using it writing this comment from South-East Europe where many people use facebook not just for cat pics but to find work and network with colleagues. It's a huge problem in developing countries where facebook IS the Internet. FB recently announced it would roll out job-posts for low-income workers[¹]. This will m…

Echoing your statement, "Facebook is the Internet". In Africa most telecoms have special data bundles for Facebook and WhatsApp. Normal data bundles to browse the Internet are just too expensive. A dollar will give you unlimited access to Facebook and WhatsApp for about 2 weeks.

I have a few cows back in my village. I have toyed with the idea of creating a cattle monitoring application that would have to make use of Facebook or WhatsApp. The herder sends me a picture every evening of the cows. I want to piggy back on the affordable connectivity given to Facebook and WhatsApp. Yes I know, this would contribute to the problem but for me losing cattle is a bigger problem. From parent, finding a job is a bigger problem so we all get sucked into Facebook.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#383

Post by 1337biz »

77ko wrote: post #136

Brian Acton's post[0] about the Signal Foundation[1] makes it sound like they could play in the same space as Facebook: > Of course, this is just the beginning. There is a lot of work to be done to make our dream a reality and we will continually be asking our peers, our community, and ourselves if there are more effective ways to serve the public good. In the immediate future we are focused on adding to our talented…

At this point I am sceptical that any communication platform can succeed beyond niche communities unless they go after the teenager market.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#384

Post by pteredactyl »

fareesh wrote: post #86

Despite the barrage of negative stories that would have ended nearly every other Presidential campaign - ranging from accusations of racism, misogyny, treason, incompetence, mental instability - despite all of it, tens of millions of Americans absolutely love President Trump. I cannot imagine how utterly frustrating it must be for them to watch the media bounce from story after story in some convoluted attempt to exp…

Exactly. And in the US I have a hard time believing the Democrats have done anything to remedy why they lost. In fact, they've made it worse.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#385

Post by golergka »

paulcole wrote: post #88
apotheothesomai wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jan's commitment to privacy motivated WhatsApp. Jan and Acton always have believed in it strongly. That said, if your company has 50 people, and FB offers nearly $20B. How exactly do you tell those people that you refused an acquisition that huge, because you personally feel that FB is bad. Could you deprive an engineer who has worked his ass off for 4 years >$100M? Anyway, I was contracting for WhatsApp, when the ac…

So you’re saying they believed in privacy strongly but believed in getting rich more. Got it. Nothing wrong with that. I’d do the same.

Your beliefs are not as important as obligations which you got yourself into. If you want to act on your own accord and don't compromise, then maintain 100% ownership of your company. When you're managing a company that doesn't belong to you completely anymore, you're obliged to act in the best interest of your shareholders.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#386

Post by pteredactyl »

zeth___ wrote: post #102
fareesh wrote: post #86

Despite the barrage of negative stories that would have ended nearly every other Presidential campaign - ranging from accusations of racism, misogyny, treason, incompetence, mental instability - despite all of it, tens of millions of Americans absolutely love President Trump. I cannot imagine how utterly frustrating it must be for them to watch the media bounce from story after story in some convoluted attempt to exp…

>What is happening now is basically vindictive hatred for Facebook from the tens of millions who feel wronged and cheated by electoral results that they lost fair and square. I'd say that a lot of the articles are driven by the news medias hatred of facebook. It used to be that facebook would drive upto 80% of the traffic on some news sites from shared articles between 2012-2017. Then when they started to tweak the n…

That's a huge part of it. Seems to me every NY media story about SV the last few years has been a hit piece.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#387

Post by switch007 »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #321

My extended family is "well distributed", living in three different countries around the world. Facebook has been an essential tool for keeping in touch and keeping track. What do I tell them all to use instead? Migrating to anything else, even if we all agreed, would be a huge pain.

For keeping in touch and keeping track, what's wrong with e-mail?

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#388

Post by isostatic »

avree wrote: post #74
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…

I think you're reading a lot into the single response he got. For anyone who doesn't want to click through, the reply said: "It appears that this requires the other party to also have the app installed, right?" There's nothing that could be even remotely translated to "why bother" or "meh" in the response. It's a simple question.

It was more the lack of reaponses that made me think it was a meh. Also I hadn't read the thread for a year or two and was going if memory when I wrote the post, did a search later.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#389

Post by aptwebapps »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #370
aptwebapps wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that tracking that finally put the fox among the chickens, it's the use to which the data was put. I think to the extent that most people thought about it at all they assumed that they'd just get more invasive advertising. Maybe the read about a girl's parents finding out she was pregnant or something like that.

I agree, but I think you're stopping well short of the natural conclusion here that seems inevitable for anybody thinking more than 10 seconds about the issue. Data is (mostly) free, ubiquitous, and permanent. When you capture data for any reason, it's logically impossible for you to be able to know or control what to what use that data will be put. I keep seeing situations where extreme examples are used to make the…

I'll be honest. I've read enough science fiction and enough warnings from people a lot smarter than myself over the last decade or so to have seen this coming but I didn't. My reaction to the warnings was to think about how much of my own and my family's data I was comfortable letting out and trying to limit our exposure.

What I did not think about much was how I, or society in general, could be affected by other peoples' data and I think other people are reacting similarly.

There's also the political angle. A lot of people are _very_ upset about Trump and the general state of politics in the US today and anything that touches on that gets amplified.

Re: WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

#390

Post by jodrellblank »

spacehome wrote: post #70
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…

> Regulations Is more government the solution to every problem? Just let people make their choice of whether the product Facebook offers is worth the privacy tradeoff.

If that worked, there would be no outrage about this because everyone who would be unhappy would have already not used it, so there would be no 'reveal' and no scandal happening.

Since people didn't know, and are shocked and annoyed, it follows that people weren't able (for whatever reason) to make the decision in advance.

Is more government not the solution to every problem? It's like a legal wikipedia of all the behaviours people have found to abuse each other in society, all gathered in one place and applied to everyone. Sounds good.

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